


when we lay down our weary guns

by GroteskBurlesque



Category: Django Unchained (2012)
Genre: BAMFs, Canon-Typical Violence, Fix-It, Girls with Guns, Hurt/Comfort, Multi, OT3, Outdoor Sex, Polyamory Negotiations, Slow Build, Threesome - F/M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-26
Updated: 2013-03-20
Packaged: 2017-11-26 23:39:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 17
Words: 38,635
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/655655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GroteskBurlesque/pseuds/GroteskBurlesque
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Each one holds the key to the others' liberation.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. trajectories

"As the fish fleetly in flood swims,

as the finch freely in sky soars:

so hence I fly, floating away,

like the wind o’er the woods wafted afar…” _Siegfried_ , Wagner

  

There are times in a man’s life—like when he is, for example, buck-ass naked and hanging by his ankles, masked and gagged, waiting to be whipped or castrated or murdered or, more likely, all of the above in order—when the pain and panic retreat against all reason to a distant place, and he finds himself with a considerable amount of time to think. 

Of course, he thinks mostly of how to escape, but the manacles are iron and the mask is tight over his face and it’s all he can do to shift in place and listen to the rattle of the chains echo in the cold, empty space of the barn. Listen for footsteps. He can’t see a fucking thing.

Naturally, he thinks of revenge, of the blood and hatred and desperate, terrible love that has kept him moving towards this particular moment in time, this particular end. He still hates, an orange-hot hate like the glowing tip of a brand. But it’s not all-consuming. It’s not all there is.

There is Hildy, somewhere, and he wonders what they’re doing to her. Her eyes, wide in those last moments as the gun pushes against the side of her head and the last hope she has is snatched away. He wonders if she’s dead. He wonders if they’ll bring her in to watch him die.

And there is Schultz, crumpled in a bloody heap on the floor of Candie’s study, and Django should hate him too because they could have all walked away. They could be miles from here if the man just knew how to lose.

He thinks of Candie, and the men around him, and he thinks that probably they never could have walked away. It would have always ended here, the chains lazily swinging him back and forth as he waits for death. In his short, miserable life, he’s seen little resembling good luck, so what reason does he have to expect it now?

Mostly, though, as the boots stomp through the grass and the door creaks open to throw blinding light over the wooden floorboards, he has just enough time to wonder what the fuck Schultz was thinking.

 

* * *

 

Rewind. Stop. Pause at another moment, earlier, a point of divergence. The calm before the storm. 

In 24 hours, a bullet will blast Lara Lee Candie-Fitzwilly in a completely improbable trajectory, but for now, no one is dead, fingers remain on triggers, bullets nestled sleeping in their chambers. It is still possible that everyone leaves well enough alone, unsatisfied but intact. But bullets are restless things, eager for freedom even if they do not yet know the path they’ll take, the home they’ll find.

Schultz pulls the trigger, and the flower on Candie’s breast blooms in red. He apologizes almost inaudibly.

In the pause before the shotgun shell crashes into his side at yet another improbable trajectory and the world erupts into an inferno of thunder and blood, what Schultz is thinking is that it’s still a better end than a man like himself might have hoped for and possibly more than he deserves. Someone screams, but it’s far away and has nothing to do with him. The shooting doesn’t stop, and that means that Candie’s still dead and Django’s still alive.

There will be a hundred, a thousand d'Artagnans, but the one he saw murdered is avenged, and no one else will die at Candie’s hand. As the gunfire fades and the darkness washes over him, he thinks that this, at least, is worth dying for.

 

* * *

 

 

Back to Django. 

He gets out because certain white motherfuckers don’t seem to get that you can take revenge with a simple bullet to the head and no drawn-out monologues, not that he’s complaining. Blows away every single son-of-a-bitch standing between him and Hildy, then crushes her to him and kisses her as though his life depended on it, as though they were the only two people left in all of creation. Then he tells her to get the horses outside saddled up. He has one or two things left to do.

He’s not a man to do vengeance in half-measures. But nor is he a man entirely without a sense of practicality, and so after he rigs up the front of the big house with dynamite, he goes in search of the papers on which Hildy’s freedom is indelibly transcribed.

Which means the shed, and Schultz, lying motionless in a pool of his own blood. Django can’t quite bear to look at his face, but he kisses his hand, touches it to the dead man’s lank grey hair, and whispers brokenly, “auf Wiedersehen.” The corpse is warm, which doesn’t make sense because a day must have passed, maybe more. And yet he’s still startled when it moves.

He draws a breath in and holds it, his own pulse too loud in his ears to be positive. Touches the man’s throat and feels something like a beat under his fingertips. Doesn’t quite believe it until Schultz mumbles his name.

“Asshole,” Django says, not without affection. It takes him several tries before he’s able to lift Schultz to his feet. “You just had to have the last word, didn’t you?”

He has to half-carry, half-drag his friend out to where Hildy’s waiting with the horses, and his arms ache by the time, between the two of them, they manage to haul him up onto Fritz’s back in front of her. There’s a second where Django might have just swung up onto Tony, swallowed his pride, and been done with it. It wasn’t bad, their original plan. Hildy, and now Schultz, are depending on him.

He pauses, looks down at the gun holstered at his belt. 

Truth is, some motherfuckers are simply in need of killing.

 

* * *

 

And Hildy? 

Hildy is awkwardly poised on the horse, the strange man who came to rescue her slumped in her arms as she presses a wad of cloth torn from her long skirts against his wound. The rags are already soaked through, her hand slick with sticky red. She’s seen men die before, but never this close, his breath ragged as he fights for every gulp of air. It’s all she can do to keep him from falling, to keep herself from falling as the horse’s muscles shift beneath her thighs. In the shadow of the shed, she listens for the sound of hoof beats, gunshots, but all she can hear is the rasp of the wounded man’s breathing, the rustling of the night wind through the leaves, and the distant song of cicadas.

Schultz clears his throat, and she flinches automatically. He notices; their bodies this close, he can’t help but feel her tremble.

“My dear Fräulein,” his voice so weak she can barely hear it, “should you choose to do so, some day you might tell me what he did to you so that I might indulge in the fantasy of killing him twice.”

She takes a few deep breaths. She can’t not be afraid of him, even if she owes him her freedom, even if he’s bleeding out in her arms and can’t possibly be a threat. She freezes again when she sees a silver glint by his sleeve.

“Take it,” he tells her, and she can see that he’s holding out the derringer grip-first. The gun feels small but solid in her hand, its weight reassuring, and the grip slides into her palm like it was born to sit there. She shivers with an almost giddy sense of power before tucking it into the top of her skirt.

“What am I supposed to do with this?”

“Watch the house,” he says, “If anyone comes out who isn’t Django, shoot him. There are five shots left. If it looks hopeless, you can save the last one for me and ride as fast as you can away. Fritz is a good horse, he will—” Schultz coughs, and she steadies him.

“Save your strength,” she says, feeling utterly lost. She doesn’t trust him. Candie, too, was soft-spoken, gentlemanly, when the mood struck him. “Django will come back. He has to.” Her voice falters at the last, and he squeezes her wrist. He doesn’t try to comfort her—he’s quiet for so long that she wonders if he’s unconscious—but at least with him there she can pretend, for the first time in years, that she isn’t entirely alone.

“Of course,” Schultz says. “He has you.” There’s a strange tone in his voice, a wistfulness, that isn’t just physical pain. She’d have thought it was envy if he hadn’t been talking about another man. “The fires of hell would not hold him back. You are a lucky woman, Brunhilde.”

She doesn’t trust him, she decides, but she might learn to like him a little.

Before she can contemplate the matter any further, a group of black-clad figures come walking through the gates, and minutes later, Django comes walking out alone and her prison of the past four months explodes into flame behind him.


	2. hellfire

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Contains gore and surgical techniques filched from spaghetti westerns. Don’t try this at home, kids.

 

They don’t get far. Fritz, though weighed down by two riders and roped to the packhorse that Django stole from the caravan, picks his way carefully across the rubble-strewn fields as if aware of the precarious condition of his burden. As sunlight squeezes out from behind an endless ocean of cotton and scraggly trees, they take refuge in the tracker shack that Django shot up on his way back to the big house. The bodies have started to bloat, so he drags them out one by one before he settles Schultz on the bed. 

There’s blood everywhere, drying in dark red-brown streaks over the walls and floorboards and bed sheets. It’s a veritable feast for the flies that buzz lazily around the cabin. He swats them off Schultz’s face and his own arms. Schultz is muttering to himself in German. Django pats his cheek gently. He blinks, eyes focusing on the shattered window behind Django and Hildy.

“You can’t stay here,” he says.

“Not planning to,” Django replies, “but you was gonna fall off that horse.”

Schultz shakes his head, clearly distressed. “There may be others.”

“I killed them all. Blew up the big house. No one’s coming after us.”

“You did?” He manages an amused snort that turns into a cough. “Proud of you.” Django can’t entirely suppress the little flush of warmth in his chest at that. “But you need to keep riding. I will slow you down.”

His heart is still racing from the gunfight and he hasn’t slept in days, so it takes him a minute to realize what Schultz is suggesting. “Oh, no. No. We ain’t leaving you.”

“You must. It’s nearly a day to Greenville.” Schultz won’t make it that far, even if no one comes looking for them, even if they hadn’t already been noticed in town and all three of them weren’t covered in the blood and ashes of Candyland. “You have the papers, yes?”

Hildy draws in an expectant breath as Django nods. “They link Hildy to Candie, and Candie’s dead. And that goddamn peckawood Crash got a hold of mine. Prob’ly went up with the rest of the big house. We a couple of escaped slaves on stolen horses with brands on our faces unless you make it through. You live, we safe.” He glances over at Hildy, and she slowly releases the blood-drenched rag she’d been pressing against the wound. Underneath it is a nightmare of torn flesh and fabric and shell fragments. “I seen worse, doc,” he says, which is true. “You’re gonna be fine.” If his voice breaks a little on the lie, he tells himself, Schultz is too preoccupied to notice. “I’ll ride to Greenville, find a doctor…”

“You will do no such thing,” Schultz says.

Django looks at his pale face, strokes his grimy hair. “No,” he says quietly, “S’pose I won’t.”

“I do have some small experience in these matters.”

“You’re a dentist,” Django says, “and how you gonna fix up yourself?”

“Not me,” Schultz replies. “You.”

 

* * *

 

An interlude; winter in the mountains. Schultz tosses coins with a flick of his wrist and Django shoots them out of the air. The older man laughs. “Amazing. You have a remarkably steady hand.” 

Django stares down at his own hands, calloused from the fields and a little shriveled from the cold, and doesn’t see anything special about them.

“How’d you end up here?” he asks. He feels strange asking a white man questions but he’s learned that this particular white man likes to talk an awful lot.

But not, it seems, about this. Schultz can’t entirely disguise the expression of pain that crosses his face, though he hides it quickly with a strained smile that quirks his mustache. “That, my boy, is an exceedingly lengthy and convoluted story, and one I’m certain would offer you little enlightenment or elucidation.”

“You pissed someone off somethin’ serious.”

“I ran afoul of certain established political interests, yes.”

“I bet you did.” He grins, but Schultz clearly isn’t enthusiastic about the line of discussion.

“One does foolish things for love,” Schultz admits finally. “And not, I might add, love of the requited variety, but rather the sort that inspires an otherwise entirely respectable dentist to venture into the throng of unsuccessful revolution and inevitable exile.”

Django isn’t entirely sure what half of those words mean, but he grasps the gist of it well enough. “Oh. What happened to her?”

Schultz gazes out over the mountains, the patches of melting snow and the yellowed grass left behind by winter’s retreat, and says nothing. As if guided by something other than his own will, one of his hands comes to rest over Django’s, prying the gun free and placing it carefully on a flat rock by his foot.

He thinks he should pull away, but he can’t quite seem to find the right moment to, and before it arrives, the other man’s lips are ghosting over his own. It isn’t a kiss, not rightly speaking—probably just Schultz’s weird attempt to distract him from a line of conversation he finds unpleasant—but he knows it’s sure as hell closer than two men are supposed to get to each other.

“Doc…” he starts.

“This never leaves the mountains,” Schultz says. “It stays behind us. It doesn’t touch your marriage or our partnership. Trust me?”

The fuck he does, except that following the lunatic son-of-a-bitch’s lead has got him freed, with a horse of his own and a thin billfold in his coat pocket, and Hildy could be a thousand miles away, or dead, and they’re both so obviously terribly lonely.

“Yeah,” he grits out. “I trust you.”

 

* * *

 

“Trust me,” Schultz says again, and takes a long swig from one of the many bottles of whisky lying around in the shack. Hildy’s set a cast-iron pot boiling rags over the fire and Django is turning over the array cruel-looking metal implements that he’s retrieved from the saddlebags. For cleaning teeth, apparently. Django wouldn’t want that shit anywhere near his mouth.

“Think it’s the other way around.” Django finishes cutting away the tattered remains of Schultz’s undershirt. There’s a deep tear in his side where the bullet went clean through, and a scatter of pellets that look painful but not deep. One inch over, maybe two, and he’d be dead. “You sure about this?”

Schultz nods. Hildy comes over to hold his legs down. Django takes a drink from the bottle and then splashes the contents over the exposed wounds. Schultz flinches and curls in on himself, but he doesn’t cry out. Django sets to work, prying bits of lead and cloth free with the thin pick of one of the instruments. He can feel the man shudder and jerk, but his own hands remain steady. There’s so much blood, and he’s not sure how much more Schultz can afford to lose.

“That’s all of it.”

“You positive?”

“Yeah,” Django says. “Positive.”

“Good.” Schultz swallows. “There’s a poker in the fire. Bring it over.”

Django’s eyes go to Hildy, finding in her face the confirmation that the fool white man has just said what he thinks he heard. She plainly heard the same thing.

“The fuck, doc.”

 “Unless you want me to bleed to death. And take off your belt.”

He gets up and goes to the fire. Wraps his fingers around the poker. He can feel the warmth radiating from it. The end that was in the fire glows in the cabin’s dim light.

He’s back at Carrucan and Big John Brittle is burning an R into his cheek with a branding iron, the pain blinding as he screams and screams. He’s hanging in chains at the barn and Stephen approaches him, bright orange illuminating his clever, wrinkled face and the goddamn snowball tufts of hair above his ears. Crash grins around the incandescent edge of a Bowie knife.

“I can’t,” he says.

Schultz, faint with blood loss, says, “Nonsense, dear boy. It’s merely hellfire. Your belt, if you would kindly oblige.”

Django unbuckles his belt. Now his hands are shaking as he gives it to Schultz and Schultz clenches his teeth around the leather.

“I’ll do it,” Hildy says. “I mean, if you really…” She reaches up and brushes her fingers across his knuckles.

Django shakes his head. Bad as the idea is, it’d be worse to subject Hildy to it as well. “Sorry about this,” he mutters, and presses the glowing tip of the poker to the torn flesh.

Schultz tries to scream despite the makeshift gag, tries to struggle free as Django goes about cauterizing his wounds, but Hildy holds him down with all her strength. Django can smell cooked flesh and his stomach roils, wants to throw the poker to the ground and let the whole damned place burn, but he forces himself to finish his grim task before he stalks over to the fire and shoves the fucking thing back into the flames. He braces his arms against the wall and sucks in a few shuddering gasps before hauling the pot back to the bed.

Hildy straightens up and tugs the belt free from Schultz’s slackened lips. There’s a bite mark that goes almost all the way through. Wordlessly, she takes one of the rags, wrings out the excess water, and washes his sweat-drenched face.

“Is he out?” Django asks. She nods. At least there’s that. They wipe the blood from him as best they can and bind his wounds with boiled rags. The bleeding’s stopped, but the surrounding skin is tortured red and bubbling. He sits by the side of the bed, running the back of his hand over Schultz’s beard.

It’s a long time before Hildy speaks. “You mean it, what you said before?”

“Huh?”

“If he lives, we’re safe?”

“Yeah. No. I dunno.” His head hurts like hell, the muscles in his arms and shoulders ache with exertion, and he’s exhausted, and for the first time in his life, he just wants someone to tell him what to do. Wants Schultz to be awake because he’d have a plan. Django’s ready to shoot anyone who comes within range of the shack but he’s not sure that being the fastest gun in the South is much use at the moment.

“Django,” she says. “You maybe saved his life. You got me out. You did good.”

“Said I wouldn’t let nothin’ happen to you.”

“That you did.”

She comes around to stand behind him, looping her arms around his shoulders and claiming his lips in a messy, sideways kiss. He half-turns and climbs to his feet. “Little troublemaker,” he growls and hauls her across the room to shove her against the wall. Her breath is hot in his mouth, the only air he can stand to inhale. His hands grasp desperately at the rough cotton of her blouse, the tangles of her hair. Her nails rake across his back.

He can’t even manage to undress her, just hikes up her skirts as she tugs his trousers down past his ass. Their fucking is fast, desperate, and she bites down on her own wrist to muffle her cries. It’s the first time he’s been alone with his wife in half a year.

In the end, he’s too tired to even come, and they slide down to the floor together. She pulls him into her arms and he leans his face into her neck and doesn’t quite cry. They’re both soaked in Schultz’s blood. He could sleep right there, on the ground, but every time he drifts off he hears the buzzing of flies and jerks right back awake.

Her small hand slips into his. “Come to bed,” she says, and rattled as he is, there isn’t anything she could say that he’d refuse. He climbs the stairs up to the loft and curls around her on the filthy mattress, still littered with the clothes one of the trackers hadn’t managed to put away before he’d shot her. He can hear Schultz snoring quietly below them, and it’s normal and familiar and if he closes his eyes, he can pretend that he’s somewhere else, somewhere safe.

He presses his nose into the soft skin at the back of Hildy’s neck, so that all he can smell is the sweet scent of her, vanquishing the reek of blood and sweat and stale clothes that lies like a thick blanket around the shack. In the presence of the only two people he’s ever cared about, he at last drifts off to sleep.


	3. complications

Schultz’s first thought as the first splinters of daylight slice though the window is that, after all that, he needs to piss.

It’s distressingly mundane and almost funny until he tries to sit up and then it’s not unlike being torn in half. Flashes of pink and blue light speckle over his eyes in a dizzy wash and he almost passes out again, clawing at the narrow mattress to stop himself from tumbling over the edge, every gasping breath like a dull knife pushing into his lungs. His world is very small, containing only the bed, the sheets stiff with various people’s blood and brain matter, the crushing heat, and the searing pain in his side. 

He moans, and that must have been out loud because the next thing he’s aware of is Django cradling him, long fingers cool against the side of his neck. He’s too weak to do anything but allow himself to be held and checked for fever and he’s entirely sure that even if he had the choice, he wouldn’t be anywhere else in the world.

Django’s not a talkative man, and kindness doesn’t come easily to him; with the life he’s led, who could expect otherwise? So he doesn’t say anything, just tucks the older man’s head up under his chin and strokes his back and Schultz thinks if it takes getting shot to get this close to him it might have actually been worth it. It’s an exquisite intimacy that he won’t have much longer, not now that Django has his Broomhilda back, and so he ignores the irritating pressure on his bladder and leans his face into Django’s bony shoulder and curses himself for being a foolish, sentimental old man.

“You’re burning up,” Django murmurs. Schultz is shaking, and aware that the tightness around his eyes is dried tears, but Django allows him the dignity of letting it go unmentioned. The fever, by comparison, is inconsequential. “You shouldn’t even be awake.”

“I was making a no doubt futile attempt to get to the outhouse,” Schultz admits, sheepish despite the months that they’d spent in the mountains with no real privacy to speak of. 

Django gives a snorting laugh and helps him to his feet. He grimaces at the sizzle of pain that arcs across his ribs. His right leg drags, unwilling to move without the use of muscles that have been inconveniently lacerated, but he’s able to shuffle outside and across to the dilapidated outhouse, leaning heavily on Django’s arm.

That’s when he sees the bodies, ripe from exposure to the elements and the heat of a Mississippi summer. They’re laid out without ceremony, swollen to bursting in the crabgrass. They’re far enough away that he can invent some ambiguity in his mind as to whether or not the dogs have been at them yet.

He finishes his business in the outhouse, rattled by how winded it leaves him, before drawing Django’s attention to the more pressing problem. “While there’s a certain—” He pauses. There’s no word in English for it, is there? “— _schadenfreude_ , in the condition of our mutual friends over there,” he says, “it does rather noticeably signal our presence to hostile parties, yes?”

“What hostile parties?” Django asks. “Everybody's dead.” 

“Sooner or later, our esteemed Monsieur Candie’s absence will be noticed in Greenville,” Schultz says. “If it hasn’t been already.”

The weary look on Django’s face as he leans against the side of the shack suggests he’s already thought of that. “I was thinking Sheriff Gus. Not for a day or two, not ‘til Hildy and me had some time to rest up and you could travel.”

It’s not a bad plan, Schultz thinks, and he might have suggested something similar were the pounding in his head not making it so hard to focus, and if he’d thought they had a day or two before someone found them. He nods weakly.

“I ain’t forgot how much I owe you,” Django says. “Don’t think I ain’t gonna get us out of this. All of us.” He reaches up and pats Schultz’s hand where it grips his arm. It isn’t easy between them, not like it was up in the mountains, but he thinks for a time that it might be bearable.

The corpses’ sightless eyes follow them as they head back inside.

 

* * *

 

Django lies to himself for at least several hours that his plan will work, during which time he sees to the horses, pumps more water from the well, and takes inventory of what’s left in the saddle bags and around the shack. The rest of Hildy’s skirt gets sacrificed to make more bandages, so she roots through the belongings of the dead woman tracker until she finds a reasonably clean change of clothes. Dressed in pants and a loose-fitting black blouse, her hair tied back and a hat shadowing her eyes, she looks harder and tougher and he grins at the sight of her.

“You make the damn prettiest gunfighter,” he tells her. 

“Maybe the second-prettiest.” Her new hat topples off her head when she kisses him. They share a quiet meal of jerky and hard biscuits over the table, sparing occasional glances at Schultz’s huddled form on the bed. Django knows he’s in bad shape, seen folks die slow, agonizing deaths from infection before, and he hates the thought of subjecting the wounded man to days of riding that might very well end him. 

Schultz is right, though, and every unaccounted-for sound outside could be trackers, a mob on horseback, even another lawman in search of a bounty. They can’t wait much longer.

He gets Schultz to swallow a few spoonfuls of biscuit mashed up in water, then more whisky. At least it seems to ease his pain a little, though his skin is hot to the touch and when Django checks beneath the bandages, the burns look blistered and raw. He’s never been so grateful for his ability to keep a poker face.

Schultz, for his part, has gone back to muttering to himself, and Django hopes that he’s as incredibly drunk as he seems. Hildy sits beside him and, to Django’s surprise, says something to him in German that makes him smile.

“You know what he’s on about?” Django asks her. 

“He’s not making much sense. And my German’s rusty. Anyway, I think he’s talking to you, not me.”

Django watches them, his beautiful wife and his brave, crazy partner, and he’s overcome with a wave of tenderness towards them both that he can’t explain, something like love and terror and joy all wrapped up together, and he almost can’t stand it until Schultz says something that makes Hildy stiffen and abruptly flee the shack.

 

* * *

 

“Hildy. Come on, Hildy. Talk to me, baby.” 

She grinds the heel of her palm into her forehead. “It’s nothing,” she says. “Just—had to get a bit of air.”

“You gone tell me what he said to make you need to go get a bit of air?”

“It weren’t for me to hear,” she says. “Or you. The man’s drunk and feverish is all.” She swallows. She tells herself that if she can make love to her husband without feeling Big John’s hand on her leg, or flabby Scotty Harmony shoving into her, or Clyde, or Mr. Von Shaft, Django’s more than capable of burying whatever he’d had to do to win Schultz’s help in saving her. When she looks up at him again, it’s with the face she used to serve Candie and his retinue at the big house, a blank half-smile that gives away nothing.

He knows her too well, though, and his hands are on her shoulders, clenched tight to the point of pain, and she can see well enough in his eyes that he has some idea of what Schultz might have said that neither of them were supposed to hear.

“I don’t blame you none,” she whispers finally. “There were things…I had to…”

She doesn’t know what she expects—maybe rage, maybe denial—but it’s not the stricken expression that falls over him like a shroud.

“You got the wrong idea.”

“It’s fine, Django.”

“I mean about him. He ain’t like that.”

“Every white man’s like that.”

“He ain’t.”

The funny thing was, she would almost have believed him. After all, what kind of a white man asks for a slave to be brought to his rooms, then doesn’t lay a finger on her? 

_The kind of white man,_ she thinks bitterly, _that has entirely different tastes._

She bites her lip and crosses the last distance between him, rests her head against his chest and lets him fold her into his arms. “Forgive me, Hildy,” he says into her hair.

“Ain’t nothing to forgive,” she replies. “You do what you gotta do.” 

“That’s the problem,” and she can’t miss the despair in his voice as he releases her and stands up straight. “I didn’t _have_ to do nothin’.” He turns away from her, shrugs her off violently when she reaches for him. “We low on food,” he says into the ground. “Goin’ to go round up some squirrels.”

He disappears into the woods before she can say another word.

 


	4. quarry

It’s stupid to cry. 

She isn’t some soft, innocent girl who doesn’t understand the way of the world. She’s maybe been made a fool of, but if she’s been wrong about some things, she’s never been given cause to doubt Django’s devotion to her. So she gives herself a few minutes to weep bitterly by the well and several more to collect herself and splash water on her face, and then she brushes the dust off her trousers, straightens her hat, and stalks back inside.

Oh.

Schultz is awake, bleary-eyed and still obviously drunk, but significantly more alert than they left him. He’s sitting up in bed with a grey wool blanket wrapped around his shoulders.

“My deepest apologies,” he says, “I am not at my best.”

She stares him down, but she’s at an unfair advantage in that she can keep her eyes open for more than a few minutes at a time.

He tries again. “I do not presume—” and she has the unique privilege to see him lost for words. “When this is over, I do not intend to impinge upon your lives in any way.”

“I don’t wanna talk about it,” she says. “I ain’t mad. It ain’t like I never been lonely, or…” She shifts from one foot to the other. “But you don’t talk like that ‘bout someone you just get lonely with. Not even when you drunk.”

“No,” Schultz says sadly. “You don’t.”

Silence falls between them, punctuated only by the distant pop of rifle shots. At least one of them gets to blow off some steam. She wishes it were so easy for her.

With considerable effort, he reaches for the half-empty bottle of homemade whisky on the nightstand. For some reason she thinks of how he’d praised her tenuous command of his native tongue, and maybe that hadn’t been just for the sake of their cover story. Something had broken in him long before he ever crossed paths with Django.

“Drink?”

It’s enough of a peace offering, though her first taste of the stuff is so foul that she almost spits it out. She does better with the second one. Maybe if she gets drunk, she can forget about this whole uncomfortable business until they’re on the move again.

“It’s a wonder our recently departed friends survived as long as they did.” Schultz takes the bottle back from her, eyeing it suspiciously before he gives in. “Unless this is the jar they used to store varnish.”

She steels herself against smiling, even if his own smile, though forced, is infectious, even if he’s the man who reunited her with her husband, who put her tormentor in the grave. Django’s last words to her echo in her skull, a soft but sure betrayal. Whatever Schultz was, he wasn’t like the men who’d enslaved her. Django had killed Miss Lara for no crime beyond her terrible harp playing; he wouldn’t spare Schultz if the older man had done him any harm.

Hildy’s not sure if that makes things better or worse.

But his smile vanishes just as quickly as it appears. “Broomhilda,” he says quietly.

“Yeah?”

“Where, exactly, did Django go?”

She huffs. “We had words. He went off hunting.”

“Did he by any chance take Tony?”

“No, why would he?”

He sets the bottle back down on the table. “Get away from the window,” he says. His voice is calm, his accent more precise than usual.

She blinks, taken momentarily aback until he violently grabs her arm and throws them both to the floor. His teeth clenched in a snarl of pain, white-faced and shaking, he slumps, panting, against the wall.

She can hear it now, the drum of hoof beats on a dirt road, and as she pulls herself up to peek through the broken glass, she can just make out the rider.

“How many?” Schultz asks.

“I see one. Doc, Django’s out there in them woods.” Her heart is going to explode out of her chest. _To come this far…_

_No,_ Hildy tells herself. She isn’t going back. Django isn’t going back. Not now, not ever. She’s still got the gun. She draws and tries to get the rider in her sights, but the distant black speck bobs up and down the road, too fast and too far away. 

“You won’t hit him at this range,” Schultz says. “Not with that.”

“You got a better idea?”

“A much worse one. But, as you say, Django is out there. And while it is entirely possible that our visitor is merely a fellow traveler and hasn’t been sent to murder all of us, it does seem unlikely to be the case.”

“Still ain’t hearing no ideas, Doc.”

“A distraction,” Schultz says. “Draw him here, away from the forest.”

She nods, almost too eagerly. At least Django would hear, and he’d have time to flee. She presses herself against the wall by the window and squeezes the trigger. The gunshot echoes through the empty clearing around the shack.

Schultz claws himself up to look. “That got his attention.” He takes in the room, then points to a corner where an overturned table provides some cover but a clear line of sight to the door. She crawls towards it, keeping her head low. He squeezes in beside her, so close that she can smell the whisky on his breath.

She tries to pass him the derringer, but he shakes his head. Her hands are trembling but they’re steadier than his; she tucks her legs towards her chest and balances the little gun on top of her knees. With every second, the hoof beats are louder, the low rolling thunder of an oncoming storm.

For a brief moment, silence, then a rap on the door.

 

* * *

 

From the forest, a string of dead squirrels and one scrawny rabbit slung over his shoulder, Django hears the shot ring out. It takes every ounce of his self-control to freeze and listen and not go running for the shack. 

But it came from that direction, no doubt about it. One shot, small caliber. The air goes out of his lungs.

He runs, brambles clutching at his ankles, until he can barely see the road, then scales the thick trunk of a weeping willow and pulls out the spyglass. One rider’s already nearly at the shack; there’s no way, on foot, Django can catch him before he reaches it. He can just make out the others coming up over the horizon.

His mind plays out rapid-fire scenarios in garish splashes of red. Escape routes, ambushes, vantage points. He sees Hildy and Schultz dead in the cabin. He lines up his rifle at the three riders coming over the hill.

There’s not a good way out of this, but if he’s not going to walk away, if none of them are going to survive, he’s determined to make the selling price of their lives as high as possible.

He squeezes the trigger. The lead rider’s horse goes down, skidding for several feet in the dirt until it comes to a stop, kicking and thrashing. The rider’s trapped under it, limbs crushed and smeared across the dun road. The second rider skirts around the dying animal and wheels around, shouting out to his fallen companion.

Django shoots off his hat. The top of his skull comes with it.

The riderless horse bolts ahead of the others and Django slides down the tree, Candie’s fine suit catching on the bark before he hits the forest floor and runs like hell for the road. He just catches the horse by a stirrup as it gallops past in a cloud of dust and pulls himself up flat on its back, twists around, and blows a hole through the third man’s throat.

He kicks his boots into the horse’s flank as hard as he can manage. He knows it won’t be fast enough. Knows, and yet all he can do is ride, the rifle in hand, towards whatever waits for him in the shack.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No animals were harmed in the making of this fanfic.


	5. valkyrie

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Racist and misogynist language in this bit. Sorry about that.

“Stonesipher? Jake?” There’s another knock at the door, and Hildy cringes. She can’t get any smaller or press any tighter into their cramped hiding spot, but that’s not for lack of trying.

“Steady,” Schultz hisses. His beard tickles her ear. She’s sweating so hard, her blouse damp against her back, that she’s not sure she can even pull the trigger.

From outside, she hears: “What the _fuck_?” She can only assume he’s caught sight of the bodies out back by the outhouse. A second later, the door flies open with a splintering crash. A bear of a man shambles inside, swinging his shotgun from one end of the room to the other.

“Not yet.” Schultz’s whisper is nearly lost beneath the creaking of the floorboards underneath the man’s boots. For all that he’s drunk and trembling with pain and fever, there’s a cool assurance to his voice, the sense that while it’s her finger on the trigger, he’s the one taking the shot.

“I can smell ya,” the big man growls. “Stinkin’ sumbitch. Killed Stonesipher. Killed all them boys out there. I know y’alls still in here, I can hear yer fuckin—”

He steps into a square of light and Schultz says calmly, “Now. Now would be a good time.”

 “—breathin’,” the man says, and Hildy shoots him square in the chest.

The shotgun falls to the floor. The man takes two shaky steps more, then joins it. He raises two sausage-thick fingers to his jacket, stares at the bright scarlet that drips from his fingertips, and howls.

Hildy pushes the table away and climbs to her knees, ready to shoot again, but Schultz grabs her arm. He indicates the rocker a few feet away from where the man writhes in pain on the floor, and she helps him over to it. He stretches his legs out, neatly kicking the shotgun farther away from the man’s flailing grasp, and folds his hands together.

He pauses for a time, as if composing his thoughts, smiles pleasantly, and says, “Hello. My name is Dr. King Schultz. This is my associate, Broomhilda.” He indicates Hildy with a tilt of his head. She wonders, not for the first time, if he’s completely insane. “She is quite keen to kill you, but I would prefer that we become acquainted first. Might you oblige my interest and tell me where you’ve come from?”

The man moans. There’s a bubbling sound low in his throat as he works up a gob of bloody saliva and spits it across the floor. It just misses Hildy’s boot. She shudders, but she forces herself not to move. Schultz makes a noise of disapproval.

“I’m afraid that sometimes I do not make myself clear.” He sounds almost apologetic. Polite. He carefully enunciates every word, as though he’s concerned that the whisky might render his speech less than perfectly comprehensible. “Who sent you? Did you come from Greenville? Are you on your own?” Though it clearly costs him to do so, the strain visible at the corners of his mouth, he leans forward in the chair, as though genuinely interested to hear the man’s answer.

The man gasps out, “Fuck you.”

Hildy kicks him in the ribs with a force that surprises her as much as it does him. She hops back on one foot, startled by the impact, and he wails again.

“Fucking nigger _bitch_.” He wheezes out several more less-than-flattering epithets, then moans, “Hurts.” 

“Yes,” Schultz says, “I am, it must be said, quite sympathetic to your predicament. But we must focus through our pain. Did you. Come. From. Greenville?”

Hildy cocks the hammer of the derringer.

“Yeah,” the man chokes out.

“Good, good! And are you currently in the employ of any persons there who have an interest in Monsieur Candie’s estate or general wellbeing?” 

“He means,” Hildy hears herself add, steadier than she feels, “who you work for?”

“Vernon Hicks. S’pose to be…mandingo fight…at the club. Mister Candie didn’t show. Fiddy dollars ridin’ on that fight.” He coughs, spraying red spittle over the floorboards.

“So this gentleman sends you, his representative, to determine the cause of Monsieur Candie’s absence. Did he send you alone?” Schultz sits back and adjusts the blanket around his shoulders. “No, Monsieur Candie would not break such an engagement without explanation. He is an important man, with important friends, and he would not disappoint without good cause. How many others are on their way?”

Now the man laughs, a gurgling noise like a straw sucking at the bottom of a glass. “Three,” he says, pulling himself up on his elbows. “And y’all gots no more’n four shots left in that little gun by my count.”

“There is a numerical disadvantage,” Schultz admits. “But you needn’t be concerned for our sake. Last question. At any point in this confusion was there made mention of two of Monsieur Candie’s recent acquaintances? A black slave trader—an, oh, how do you say—a One-Eyed Charly, and a German gentleman of advancing years but remarkable good looks?”

“No,” the man on the floor says, “Ain’t heard tell nothin’ like that.”

Schultz grins, as pleased with himself as a cat toying with a half-dead mouse, and claps his hands together. “Excellent. We are done here.” He looks expectantly at Hildy, and at first she doesn’t know what he wants from her, until the man flops to one side, his hand spidering towards his shotgun. She clutches the derringer with both hands, squints one eye shut, and fires. Hot blood sprays across her face. He twitches once, twice, then is still.

She makes it to the laundry tub before she drops to her knees and vomits. Schultz doesn’t say a word until she’s retched up everything left in her stomach and her face is streaked with tears, and then he calls her name. She tucks the gun into her oversized holster and trudges over to him. The act over, he’s sunken into the rocking chair, looking older and somehow diminished.

“He would have killed you,” Schultz says. “And me, and Django, had he found him. Still. It is not an easy thing, I know.” He takes her hand, small and narrow in his own, raises it to his lips, and kisses the fingers that moments ago ended a life. “You are very brave, Fräulein.”

She doesn’t feel brave. She feels sick, and frightened, and lost. The pulse in her ears is so loud that she almost doesn’t hear the approach of another horse. She doesn’t go to look this time, just lifts the abandoned shotgun from the floor and tests its weight.

Somewhere in the terror, there’s strength too, an exhilarating power, and maybe she understands a little more what makes Django and Schultz the men they are.

 _I can do this,_ Hildy thinks, _I am doing this._

Bone-tired though she is, she braces the shotgun against her shoulder, readies herself as the battered door creaks open—

—and her husband’s rifle is leveled at her head.

“Hildy?”

She nearly trips over the dead body in the middle of the floor in a frantic effort to get to him, to lose herself in his arms. His thumbs streak red across her face—“It’s not mine,” she manages faintly—and then he’s kissing her forehead, her lips, and she tastes copper and salt.

“Three more are coming,” she blurts out.

“Not anymore.”

He puts the rifle aside and stands there for a time, silent. Staring at her, then staring past her.

“I thought I lost you both,” he says; he’s asking for permission with that last word, and she can’t withhold it, not to either of them. He drops to his knees beside Schultz and buries his face against the other man’s knee, pulls Hildy close with his one arm and they stay like that for a while.

“Your wife is a good shot, by the way,” Schultz says, and Django laughs a little and lifts his head to look at the dead man on the floor.

“Wasn’t much,” Hildy protests.

“Quite the contrary. Our Brunhilde, I think, is not merely a princess on a mountaintop waiting to be rescued. She is a valkyrie.”

She expects to see his sardonic smile, but for once, his face is completely serious. 

“You gone have to tell me what that is later, Doc,” Django says. “For now, maybe we can get the fuck out of Chickasaw County.”

 

* * *

 

By nightfall, Schultz is ready to die.

He’s lashed to Fritz, face down, a bedroll and several coats between him and the horse to give him room to breathe. It’s enough to make him pity the corpses of the poor bastards he’s transported in nearly the same manner, jostled and bashed by every bob of the horse’s trot. He drifts in and out of consciousness, waking when Fritz comes down too hard on a hoof or the pain in his ribs decides to stir. Through the haze of agony, he’s aware of the urgency of their journey, despite its indignities, but that doesn’t make him hate it any less.

They make camp by a winding stream, beneath tall oaks and hickories. Django tethers the horses and sets up their two tents before releasing Schultz from his torment and helping him into one of the tents. He’s never been so grateful to collapse onto a bedroll, the ground rocky and uneven but no less welcoming for any of its rough edges.

“We gonna be okay, Doc?” Django asks.

“Are our portraits being printed on handbills as we speak, do you mean?”

Django sits down across from him and lights one of those cigarettes he’s taken to smoking. “That too.”

“The good people of Greenville appear not to have our descriptions.”

“Well, that’s something.” Smoke spirals and eddies lazily around his mouth, and Schultz tries not to stare too hard at the curl of his lips around the cigarette holder, at his long fingers rubbing the cramps out of his legs. It’s not, he tells himself, immoral to miss the hours they’d stolen together in the mountains. That’s only human. But Hildy is a good woman, and she deserves happiness as much as she deserves freedom. “I should—”

Shultz watches the shadows sway on the walls of the tent. “You should,” he says. Django hesitates, then backs out the opening flap.

“Get some rest,” Django adds.

He tries, but his body is one giant bruise from the ride out of Chickasaw, and his burns, having started to heal, itch terribly and drive him to distraction. He can hear the indistinct murmurs of conversation in the tent next to him under the buzzing of mosquitos, then the sounds of fabric rustling and the conversation gives way to other sorts of noises.

 _To be young and in love,_ he thinks, and he can neither fault them nor his own body’s treacherous reaction. He can picture Django, all wiry muscle and hard angles, framed by moonlight, his body moving over hers, sleek and smooth, sees their limbs twisting together and her curls spread beneath her head like a halo. 

He tosses over on the bedroll, trying to ignore the heat between his legs and his throbbing skull, tries not to think about winter, and the times that other tent had gone unused. Long after they’ve gone silent, he lies awake and stares up through the gaps between the tent walls at the stars.

Something is moving outside. He sees a shadow fall over the tent, then the flap opens. Hildy’s wide, dark eyes peer in at him.

“Sorry,” she says. “Django’s asleep and I...I keep thinkin’ about that man, back in the shack. Can I?”

His side twists painfully as he sits up to give her room to squeeze in. She’s cross-legged, wrapped in a blanket that makes her look smaller and more vulnerable, and her hair is tangled and plastered to her face. He waits for her to speak first, but she just bites her lip nervously and shakes her head.

“It was like that for me, the first time,” he says finally. “And the second. And quite a few more after that.”

“How many men you kill, Doc?”

“It has been a profitable four years.”

“Would you show me how to shoot a gun proper-like?”

He snorts. “You want to get into the bounty hunting business, Broomhilda?”

“Don’t wanna go back to no plantation in chains,” she says, and there’s more steely determination than fear in her eyes.

“One can hardly begrudge you that.”

She twists a strand of her hair around her finger. Swats a mosquito that gets too close to her arm. He thinks she’d be pacing if there were space in the tiny tent. “You made the bed,” she says finally.

“Sorry?”

“When Miss Lara brought me up to your rooms. I thought—well, just what I was supposed to think. An’ you gave me a glass of water and started making up the bed.”

“I can’t abide an unmade bed.”

“You act like it’s nothing, but…” She fidgets some more, avoiding his gaze. Then, impulsively, she leans over and kisses his scruffy cheek. “It ain’t nothing, is all.”

The warmth of her lips remains, even after she’s pulled away and ducked out of the tent without another word.


	6. the raven and the rabbit

Django squints up at the sun as they cross over into—he thinks, anyway—Alabama, tracing its path overhead as he guides Tony along the trail. He knows the route, more or less, though it’s a much slower journey than the one that had led them down to Mississippi. He avoids towns and thoroughfares; for days, they haven’t seen a sign of another human soul. He tries not to dwell on thoughts of comfortable beds and meals that aren’t roasted squirrel, tries not to wonder if Hildy looks thinner or if the bruised purple shadows under Schultz’s eyes are deeper.

There are landmarks, here and there; a rock formation that seems familiar, burned stretches of forest and failed farmland that shred deep, ragged scars across the terrain. Mostly, though, it’s the same day after day: endless trees, endless winding trails overgrown with weeds. All three of them are sore and blistered and chafed, and there’s never enough to eat, never enough hours to sleep before the bright glare of morning signals that it’s time to move on.

He and Schultz had ridden down south with some urgency, Django recalls, eager to do battle with dragons and rescue Hildy from her mountaintop. Still, there’d been times when the afternoon heat was at its worst and they’d stopped, set up a picnic by the stream and drank tea and splashed water at each other and slept in each other’s arms—and it’s no use think on that, not now, when every hour they waste could mean the difference between life and death.

So he doesn’t let them stop, except at night, when runaway slaves and bandits and fugitives have a fighting chance against those who would run them to ground. His only respite is in darkness, huddled around a meager campfire, his rifle always in arm’s reach and Hildy and Schultz closer still.

None of them sleep easily, so they tell stories. Schultz tells them about valkyries that first night, the next, about the idisi, who free warriors from their bonds and help them flee their enemies. He points up at the Plough (“You tellin’ stories about the Drinking Gourd to a couple a runaway slaves?” Hildy scoffs; “Do you want to hear the story or not?”), and says that where he comes from, it’s called Odin’s wagon, driven by a great raven who travels his corner of heaven in an endless circle.

When it’s his turn, Django protests that he isn’t good at stories. Hildy says that can’t be right, because the only thing that gets a man through working in the fields is telling stories and singing, and she happens to know from experience that he can’t sing worth a damn.

“I ain’t much of a field hand,” Django says. “Ran away, didn’t I?” Schultz laughs and shifts up so that his head is on Django’s leg—just barely, but he can feel its weight there—and Hildy leans up against his side and tucks her head against his chest. He decides that neither of them play fair and sighs.

“Fine,” he says at last. “I’ll tell you a damn story.”

Carrucan is a lifetime ago, but he does remember a few stories from the plantation. He found those fables ridiculous back then. The weakest and most downtrodden always came out on top, and even as a little child he knew that this wasn’t the way of the world. Schultz insists that his stories are children’s stories too, though by now Django knows that Siegfried doesn’t actually marry Brunhilde and they both burn at the end.

“There was this lion,” he starts, “in a forest. And bein’ the biggest, baddest motherfucker around, lion figures he can get whatever he want, whenever he want. The other animals, they don’t like this much, but every time someone stands up to him, they get ate.” 

The fire crackles. Hildy pokes at the logs with a stick, and a tiny shower of bright sparks explodes into the darkness. “That lion, he get powerful and he get lazy, and instead of goin’ out and hunting for his meals like all the other animals, he make them all come to him. He just sits in his cave all day and says, ‘ah, tomorrow I want crow for lunch,’ and the crow just flies right over to the lion’s cave ‘cause he too scared shitless to do anything else.

“One day, the lion decides he want rabbit for his dinner. The rabbit, he scared, but what he gonna do? He try to avoid that lion cave, but he know when his number’s up. He spend his last hours fucking around, trying to think up a way out, ‘til he sees his shadow and gets an idea in his little rabbit head. He show up at the lion’s den. The lion’s pissed, like ‘where the fuck you been at, you supposed to be on my plate three hours ago.’

“Rabbit says, ‘you gotta come with me. There’s an even bigger, badder lion out there, handsomer too, and he’d like to eat me. I only barely just escape him. You want me for dinner, you gotta fight him off first.’

“So off they go, and the rabbit leads the lion to the deepest well he can find, and he says, ‘look in there, that’s where the other lion be at.’ The lion looks, and sure enough, there’s another lion staring back at him. He growls, it growl. He roars, it roar.”

He pauses for a moment; as well as teaching him how to kill white men for money, he thinks, Schultz has taught him how to maintain a sense of the dramatic.

“Then,” he says, “lion turns around and says, ‘why you fuckin’ with me, rabbit? That just my reflection.’ He turns, ready to tear the rabbit to pieces, and…the rabbit pulls out a shotgun and blows the lion’s fucking brains out.”

Hildy giggles and shoves him playfully. “Pretty sure that ain’t how that story goes.”

“You don’t like my ending, you tell it yourself,” Django replies primly. “Anyway.” He glances down at Schultz, hair fanned out over the maroon fabric of Django’s trousers, eyes half-closed. “Done its purpose, right?” 

“For the most part,” Schultz says, and yawns.

“I could sleep,” Hildy says. “Out here, even.”

He nods, relieved; he doesn’t think he could bear disturbing Schultz any more than necessary. There’s not quite enough room for all three of them on two bedrolls, properly speaking; if he’s going to be improper about it, wedged between the two of them with one arm draped over Hildy and Schultz curled up against his back, well, it’s not conducive to sleep, but it’s not exactly uncomfortable, either.

In the dying embers of the fire, Django stares up at the raven in his sky-wagon, listens to the soft snuffling of the horses tied up past the tents. Kisses Hildy’s temple, the palm of her hand, already calloused from days of riding. “And don’t think you gettin’ off so easy, li’l troublemaker,” he adds.

She props herself up on one elbow and leans over the two men. “It’s only fair,” she admits, and hums to herself, finding a key. Even still, he’s startled when she begins to sing.

 

“ _Der Mond ist aufgegangen._

_Die gold'nen Sternlein prangen_

_am Himmel hell und klar…_ ”

 

Her voice is hoarse and tentative; she tests each phrase out carefully before committing to it. He closes his eyes and there’s nothing but the warmth of the two bodies on either side of him, and the night, and her song.

 

“ _Der Wald steht schwarz und schweiget._

_Und aus den Wiesen steiget_

_der weiße Nebel, wunderbar…_ ”

 

“I’ve never heard you sing before,” he murmurs.

“Never had no cause to,” she says, and the gossamer strands of the song bind them all to sleep.

 

* * *

 

 

It’s nearly dark again when Fritz suddenly picks up his pace, snorting and bobbing his head as he clips along the road. “What is it?” Hildy calls out.

“He recognize this road,” Django says, beaming. He rides up and pats the horse’s neck, then reaches back to pass her the spyglass. Hildy squints through it; she can make out the peaks of roofs, clustered in the foothills of the mountains. Relief floods her body; she barely feels the bruises or the stiffness in her limbs. All that matters is the last stretch of road between them and Sheriff Gus’ cabin.

“We keep goin’?”

Django glances back at the sun, low and red through the tree branches, and up at Schultz, a huddled and silent pile of blankets roped to Fritz’s back. It’s treacherous by night; they have no lanterns, and the road through the mountains is steep and so narrow that they’d had to ride single-file in places. But she can barely stand the thought of stopping now, not with their refuge in sight.

“We keep goin’,” he says, and urges Tony onwards. “Hey,” he calls back, “you ever name that packhorse of yours?”

“Huh?”

“Your nag. Horse gotta have a name.”

She’s quiet for a moment, patting the beast’s golden mane, then realizes that it’s no decision at all. “D’Artagnan,” she says.

Django looks away like he’s ashamed. “It’s a good name,” he says finally, and doesn’t say much after that.

She’s so focused on the moonlit road snaked ahead of them that she doesn’t hear the branches and leaves give way to horse hooves before four bright lanterns emerge from the indigo wash of shadow. Hildy’s stomach lurches and she reaches for her gun; as she twists to free it from its holster, she sees two more lamps and above them, leering bearded faces; a group of pattyrollers on the outskirts of town, searching the woods for fugitive slaves. Django spurs Tony ahead of Fritz, his rifle leveled at the men on the road ahead.

“Passes, boy.” The man who speaks is the biggest and ugliest of the bunch, white and fat as a grub with sparse whiskers ringing his chin.

“I ain’t no slave,” Django says, and Tony trots forward into the pale circle of light cast by the patrol’s lanterns.

The grub laughs and doesn’t lower his gun. “Oh, I knows who you is,” he says. He gestures to his companions and before she can fire off a shot, one of them grabs her leg and yanks her out of the saddle. Her ankle twists, caught in a stirrup, and D’Artagnan barely avoids falling himself as she’s hauled to the ground. The other man wrenches her wrist backwards, sending the little gun flying into the rocks. Hildy screams and Django’s got his rifle aimed at her captors in a flash, but she’s caught against her captor’s enormous stomach with one of his meaty arms crooked around her neck and the other holding a pistol to the side of her head.

“I knows _exactly_ who you is,” the grub continues. “You the uppity fancy pants garboon thinks he’s a lawman. I got the right nigger, boy?” 

“Unfortunate for you,” Django says.

“We don’t want no trouble,” Hildy says. “We just on our way to see Sheriff Gus.”

“An’ y’all won’t get no trouble,” the grub says, “if y’all show us yer papers.”

She makes frantic eye contact with Django; he nods. “In the saddlebags,” Hildy whispers.

The fat man holding her doesn’t budge, but his companion roots through the saddlebag until he finds the crumpled and bloodstained papers. He unfolds them and squints.

“Give ‘em here, Jeb.”

“Satisfied?” Django doesn’t take his eyes off Hildy or her captor. 

“Broomhilda Von Shaft. Really?” He scratches at his thin beard. “Don’t see no papers for you here, boy.”

“If you know who I am,” Django says, “then you know who my partner is, an’ you know he can vouch for me.”

One of the other pattyrollers, silent so far, circles around so that he’s a foot away from Fritz. He raises his lantern so that it’s level with Schultz’s face, then seizes a handful of his hair and slams his head down hard. Fritz whinnies and rears on his hind legs, and Schultz moans; Hildy has to stifle the cry that wants to burst from her throat in sympathy.

“Yer partner looks half-dead to me.”

“Y’all are outnumbered,” the leader says. “Best be puttin’ down that rifle and come along nice.”

“Like hell,” Django says.

Hildy sees herself kicking, biting, squirming free, her hand lightning-quick over the rocks to grab the derringer. In her mind, she squeezes off the last two shots, one into each of the men closest to her. She snatches the pistol from the fat man’s corpse and takes out the pattyroller beside Schultz, buying Django enough time to blow away the other three. 

Instead, she struggles vainly, but she’s weak from hunger and the hot box and the sores and sprains and besides, the man is easily three times her size. She hears the grub say, “Kill them two jokers.” Hears someone else ask, “What about the girl?” and the response, “Save her for later.”

 _The lion wins,_ she thinks. _Of course the lion always wins._  

And then a shotgun blast splits the night in half.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. Sorry for the delay in updates; this story grew a plot on me.
> 
> 2\. The song Hildy sings is "Abendlied," and you can listen to it here:
> 
> http://www.holger-saarmann.de/texte_abendlied.htm


	7. belonging

The thing about knowing that you’re going to die, and soon, is that it relieves you of all other responsibilities and considerations.

In the instant before the shot is fired, his mind is as lightning-quick as his draw. Django is certain that, even surrounded and outgunned, he can take out all six of the men and walk away unscathed.  He’s also certain that he can’t do it before the fat son-of-a-bitch splatters Hildy’s brains across the rocks, and that’s not something he intends to live to see.

He’s actually easing his finger off the trigger when he hears the shot, quieting the fierce animal within him that wants to live at any cost, and it’s only this small, futile surrender that prevents a complete bloodbath. He blinks, startled, at a sight that could only have been conjured from his desperate imagination: the grizzled, scowling sheriff on his big chestnut stallion with his shotgun aimed just above their heads. 

“Would all y’all like to calm the fuck right down and put your weapons down on the ground?” Gus booms. When one of the pattyrollers hesitates, the sheriff fires another shot that barely avoids nicking the man’s hat. “That weren’t a question.”

Django’s still-dazed mind doesn’t quite accept that he’s going to live to see another morning after all, and it’s only when Gus’ lantern veers upwards to reveal the fat man holstering his pistol and raising both of his hands, freeing Hildy to collapse boneless on the side of the road, that he releases his iron grip on his own rifle. He’s already swinging off Tony’s back to run to her, but the sheriff gets there first, holding out a hand to help her to her feet as though he were asking her for a dance at a ball. Her twisted ankle goes sideways on her and she wobbles unsteadily, but he notices with a certain measure of pride that she still manages to sweep up her little gun and tuck it back in its holster.

“Can you stand?” Gus asks her.

“I can ride,” Hildy replies, and he lifts her up by the waist onto D’Artagnan’s saddle. Having deemed everyone satisfactorily disarmed, he strides over to the pattyrollers’ leader.

“Time to be movin’ along, Donnie.” The sheriff’s tone is light, but Django’s known him long enough to hear the threatening undercurrent.

“That slave’s a runaway,” Donnie protests.

“Even if that were so—an’ you and I both know it ain’t—you was fixin’ to kill the closest he got to a lawful owner just now.” He shifts his grip on the gun. “Or was my eyes playing tricks in the dark?”

“Now, Sheriff…” the other one, Jeb, starts, and Django thinks Gus looks almost pissed enough to put a bullet in someone’s head.

“I said, git a move on,” Gus growls. “Last I checked I was still the law in this town.”

Donnie casts a sullen glare at Django, then kicks his spurs into his horse’s flank. Gus watches the patrol depart in single file. It’s only when the last echoes of the hoof beats have faded into the night that he claps a hand to Django’s shoulder.

“That right there gonna cost me the next election,” Gus says.

Django exchanges a nervous glance with Hildy. They all rehearsed the story the night before, but Schultz had said that they wouldn’t know they were safe until they were inside Gus’ cabin, reading his wall of handbills. “We was tracking the Quincy gang down south,” Django says. “They got the drop on us. Now they out for blood, and the doc’s hurt bad, and we didn’t know where else to go.”

Gus shrugs. “Eh,” he says, “I’m too old for this horseshit anyway. ‘Sides, it was worth it to see the look on that sumbitch’s face when he pissed hisself.” He hikes himself back into the saddle. “You comin’?”

 

* * *

 

It’s all he can do to not pass out on the floor of the sheriff’s tiny cabin. He and Gus haul Schultz off Fritz’s back. He’s ragdoll-limp and Django worries that they might be too late, but when they get him on the single mattress and Django feels his neck for a pulse, he closes his hand around Django’s fingers and squeezes tightly. Hildy sits in the chair by the bed with her injured leg propped up on a wooden crate, and Django can finally breathe again. 

Gus clears his throat and says something about riding into town to fetch Doc Reed, but Django barely hears him, his attention on the long, windowless wall opposite the door and the yellowed sheets of paper haphazardly tacked to its logs. He scrutinizes each one; more than a few have to do with escaped slaves, but he doesn’t see his name anywhere. He doesn’t even hear the door close as the sheriff leaves.

“He always has coffee around,” Django says. He’s starving, but coffee will do in a pinch. “I’m gonna—”

Hildy tugs on his arm and he kneels beside her. She presses her forehead against his and he closes his eyes. “We made it,” she says.

“Guess we did.” His nerves sing, shrill as a dog whistle, and his muscles are tense in anticipation of another desperate flight, another doomed battle. He peels himself stiffly off the floor and limps over to the hearth. He puts the coffee on because it’s something to do with his hands. Gradually, the smoke rising from the heavy pot and the cramped, acrid familiarity of the cabin have their way with him, and he breathes in the scent of the boiling coffee beans and leans his back against the warm bricks and thinks they’ll be okay here for awhile. By the time he pours the coffee into two tin mugs and brings one over to Hildy, his hands have mostly stopped shaking. He perches on the edge of the bed, his fingers occupied by the coffee mug but nevertheless close to them, two poles to which he’s inexplicably drawn.

He lets himself think, foolishly and all-too-briefly, that he could have something like this forever, a cluttered one-room cabin amid white-peaked mountains, with nothing to intrude on their private freedom. Surely there must be secret corners of the country where the scars on their faces are a foreign language, indecipherable and meaningless, somewhere with no slaves and no masters.

Even as he imagines it (Hildy, a slender dandelion in her yellow summer dress amid the tall grass, Schultz pushing his wire-rimmed glasses up the bridge of his nose as he reads from a wrinkled broadside) he knows it can never come to pass. They are all three of them objects in motion, and they will always be hunted, always be runaways. And though he feels more peace here than he has ever known, drinking coffee and sitting quietly between them, he knows it’s madness for a man to split his heart in two halves.

The last dregs of the coffee sit heavy and bitter on his tongue when the door opens and Gus returns with the town’s doctor, a cadaverous old man with a worn leather bag clenched tight in front of him. He gives Django and Hildy no more regard than he does the small collection of weapons laid out on the table, and Django gets out of his way, certain that the man would trip right over him before acknowledging his presence. He stalks over to stand with the sheriff, feeling useless. He watches Reed peel back the layers of makeshift bandages tied around Schultz’s torso, then quickly finds his own dull reflection in the tin mug rather than watch any further. He can see a man torn apart by dogs, but one whimper of pain from Schultz and he can’t disguise his flinch.

“Let’s go outside, son,” Gus says. “We’re only crowding them.” With an apologetic glance at Hildy, who gets no such reprieve, he follows the sheriff out to the porch. “Cigarette?”

He accepts it gratefully, the tobacco a welcome distraction. It’s not in him to thank someone aloud, but he nods his head and Gus seems to understand well enough. They sit for a while in the long silence of two men unaccustomed to lengthy conversations.

“It’s a good thing you done,” the sheriff tells him. “Carryin’ him up here all the way from the Mississippi. Can’t have been easy, ‘specially for, well—” He gives a nervous little chuckle. “A man such as yerself.”

“We stayed away from people,” Django says.

“Truth is,” Gus says, “I expect to outlive him. Fellow has a way of finding trouble.”

“Trouble mostly don’t see him coming.”

Gus takes a drag of his cigarette, exhaling a long blue stream of smoke into the night. “A man shows up in these parts, what, three, four year ago? Barely speaks English but he can shoot the prick off a fly from a hundred yards. A man like that ain’t always been on the right side of the law, if you get my drift.”

“Ain’t sure I do.”

The sheriff turns to him, a hard glint in his pale eyes. “A posse out of Little Rock caught up with the Quincy gang not three days after you two cocksuckers rode out for Mississippi.” A long cylinder of ash, untouched, droops from the tip of his cigarette, and Django can feel the blood drain from his face. “Whatever bidness you two got yourselves mixed in ain’t none of mine. I figure he got his reasons.” He stands up and looks through the filmy window. “I saw you lookin’ at the handbills when y’all came in. You ain’t on none. Not yet. But a man like Donnie Hicks don’t need no warrant, an’ there’re plenty more like him.”

It’s more words than Django’s ever heard him say over countless cups of coffee, when he and Schultz sat at his table while corpses froze in the snow outside. He stubs out his cigarette.

“You got him this far,” Gus says, “but you an’ yer girl oughta be lookin’ northwards now. Best place for folks like you, I hear.”

“There ain’t no folks like me,” but even as he says it, he knows it isn’t true. There might be two others, and the thought of losing either is the leaden weight he’s dragged with him all the way from Candyland.

Gus pats his arm. “Looks like the worst is done in there,” he says.

Inside, Reed is winding a bandage around Hildy’s ankle, doing his best to avoid contact with the bare skin of her foot. “She needs to stay off it for a day or two,” he pronounces.

“And the doc?” Gus asks. Schultz is watching them with heavy lidded eyes from underneath a fur throw. It might just be that he’s in a bed, as safe as anyone who’d recently put a bullet through one of the richest and most powerful men in the South can hope to be, but Django thinks that he looks a little better, the lines of fatigue and pain creasing his face less pronounced. There’s a small bottle on the bedside table that, after some effort to put the letters together, Django understands to be laudanum. 

“A goddamned miracle,” Reed replies. “Them negroes of his must be powerful loyal to keep him alive all this way.”

“Not mine,” Schultz mumbles.

“Sorry?”

“They’re not mine.” Schultz yawns, and he turns his gaze on Django, standing by the door. Hildy and Gus and Reed are all there, so Django doesn’t move to his side, doesn’t lie beside him and drape his arm around him like he did on so many cold nights in the mountains. Even still, his heart gives a peculiar clench when Schultz adds, “I am theirs.”


	8. possession

There’s a time, after their desperate ride out of Mississippi and before the warrant with Django’s name shows up in the town’s post office, when Hildy lets herself believe that they won’t need to run anymore.

She lies on her stomach in the grass, leaning up on her elbow to squint through the rifle sights. The sunlight is thick and heavy on the back of her blouse, glinting off brown glass, and sweat beads at her hairline. She exhales sharply in frustration when the bullet doesn’t so much as rattle any of the bottles sitting on fence posts at the end of the field.

“I ain’t no good at this,” she complains to Schultz after her sixth or seventh attempt. She’s secretly glad that it’s him and not Django who’s agreed to teach her to shoot. A part of her suspects Django still sees her as a house slave with soft skin and impeccable manners. He’d take her failures as proof that she should be protected and cosseted.

Schultz merely says, “If everyone were a good shot without working at it, there would be a glut on the bounty hunting market, and I would be substantially less wealthy.”

He’s lying beside her on his back, hands folded behind his head, his attention occasionally drifting to Django, who’s seeing to the horses by the cabin. Several days of deathlike sleep and no small amount of laudanum have gotten him to the point where he can, leaning on a walking stick, hobble outside. For her part, after a day of complete immobility, Hildy declared herself as good as new, and if her wrist and ankle bother her at all now, she says nothing of it.

“It don’t bother you?” she asks, “a woman killin’ folks?”

He climbs to his knees, not without some difficulty. “I would be guilty of tremendous hypocrisy if it did, given that I owe you my life for doing that very thing. May I?” He holds out his hands, palms up. She nods. Barely touching her—but enough that she shivers through the thin cotton of her sleeves—he repositions her grip on the rifle. “Where I come from, a woman such as yourself, no matter how lovely her face or how gentle her spirit, would have led a lifetime of drudgery in a factory and likely have met an equally ignoble death.” He tilts her shoulder back, his thumb just above where one of her scars ends, and she’s reminded, bizarrely, of the dancing teacher who visited the Von Shaft girls before they grew bored of the lessons. “The men of this world have not spared you suffering for all that you are a woman. Why then, should you show them any mercy?”

She turns to stare at him, but he cups the side of her face, turning her head back towards the sights. 

“There.” His voice is like silk in her ear. “Think of it not as a bottle whose only sin is that it has outlived its usefulness as a receptacle. Give it a face, yes?”

“Monsieur Candie,” she names it, and this time, the glass shatters around the bullet’s impact and topples from its post. She laughs, dropping the rifle to clap her hands together. He catches it and thrusts it back at her. “Again,” he insists.

The next one is Clyde, the slave trader whose rough hands she can still feel pinching her breasts. Old Man Carrucan, leering through his yellow shades, cracks in half as a bullet collides with the swell of his neck. Each one of the Brittle brothers topples off his post in turn. One by one, every man who wronged her crumbles into a sparkling heap. The rhythm of the gunshots pulses through her and soon every conscious thought is gone from her mind, and there’s only the target and the trigger. She flexes her hands, darkened and hardened from days of riding, and the thrill that jolts through her body pools low in her belly. 

“Good,” Schultz says, surveying the damage through his spyglass. “Tomorrow, you will do it again. Except faster.” He finds the walking stick in the grass and uses it to awkwardly pull himself to his feet. She hesitates for a moment before slinging the rifle over her shoulder and bracing her hand on his elbow. The sheriff’s checked shirt and threadbare work trousers hang loosely on him, and his hair and beard are long and unkempt. He looks to her hollowed-out and worn, a different creature entirely from the sophisticated gentleman who’d so charmed Candie and Miss Lara until Stephen had cottoned on to his game. And maybe it’s the afternoon heat, the hypnotic repetition of shot after shot, but for a moment, she imagines what it would be like to press closer to him, to lift her face to his and feel his lips—chapped and parched from his long bout of fever—beneath hers, to thank him for freeing her and for putting a gun in her hands.

She understands, then, what Django must have felt over those cold months with no one there to watch him or judge him. Knows what it is to look into those terribly sad eyes and see longing there.

But there’s being freedom and there’s freedom, and there’s Django standing over by the horses, and Schultz, though he might flirt and compliment her beauty, is not a man who would unduly risk impropriety, or betray the closest person he has to a friend.

“Doc,” she says, and she doesn’t release his arm. “What face you see on them bottles?”

“No one’s,” he says, and before she can challenge him on it, he adds, “a soldier, at a railway station in Düsseldorf. I never learned his name. But every man I have killed since has been him.”

It’s more than he wants to say, she can tell. “What you said before, about how you gonna leave when this all blows over?”

“I did mention something to that effect.”

“It’s just, well, I don’t think Django wants that. An’ I don’t think I want that neither.”

She blurts it out before she can decide whether it’s the right thing to say, but he smiles softly and only says, “I am very glad of that, Fräulein,” and she knows better than to discuss it any further.

 

* * *

 

Django teaches her to read the way Schultz taught him, sounding out the letters and syllables that make up the wanted handbills, judging each bounty on its merits and pitfalls, its ease of tracking and its promised reward. She can’t prevent the shudder of fear at each new one that Gus retrieves from the post office, but she’s pleased at her ability to make sense of the blocky type, even when—as in most cases—there’s no drawing to accompany it. She follows as his slender finger divides the longer words into fragments and his obvious pride when she finally outpaces him swells her heart with more love for him than she could have ever thought possible.

She rejects Waldon Rheinhart (“Embezzlement, age 29, black mole on left cheek, wears a No. 10 shoe, a hard boozer”) as not worth the $50 reward offered for him, and Schultz vetoes Burr Callahan (“age 33, height 5 feet 6 inches, very hairy over his body”) despite the $1000, dead or alive, given that he’s probably fled too far to easily catch in the six months since the warrant was issued. They pass over the numerous flyers for escaped slaves and their crude drawings of bindle-toting black men. She wonders about Henrietta Burns, yellow in complexion and sullen in demeanor, Tom May, dark skin and noisy and troublesome when drunk, and whether or not they made it safely north.

They condemn just as many to a second pile: Orrin Lafferty and any known associates, bank robbery; Wylie Stockton, who murdered a deputy, the outfit he wore when fleeing lovingly described down to the detail of a missing button. Coleman Finney wouldn’t ordinarily be worth the bother for $35, but he’s nearby and wanted for rape, and so Hildy adds him to the pile.

And so their fortune accumulates on the chipped wooden table in the sheriff’s cabin, waiting to be claimed.

 

* * *

 

Schultz rides into town a week or so after they’d carried him into Gus’ cabin. He makes a vague sort of claim about the telegraph office and needing to wire his bank in St. Louis and heads off on Fritz before either Django or Hildy can raise enough of an objection to stop him. Django spends most of the day doing his best not to worry, distracting himself by teaching Hildy her letters (though, if he wants to be honest about it, she can read almost better than he can now, and better than Schultz, whose reading glasses made it out of Candyland in worse condition than he did) and raining destruction on a pyramid of tin cans behind the cabin.

By the late afternoon, he decides that he should have gone with, regardless of whether or not the telegraph office is as boring as Schultz claims it is, and since when did he have any sort of dealings with a bank, anyway? Last Django was aware, he kept his money stashed in a giant tooth. The truth of it is, all three of them are going stir-crazy, pent up as they are in the cabin during the day. Hildy isn’t happy about it, but he just tells her to send Gus if he doesn’t come back by nightfall.

What he doesn’t count on is there being no sign of Schultz anywhere that he can see, that no one in the town will so much as make eye contact with him, let alone answer his questions, and that the first person he recognizes is not in fact his idiot partner but Donnie fucking Hicks, and if that wasn’t bad enough, he’s riding alongside a slaver driving a cart with five miserable, half-naked men roped together in its cab.

Hicks is all too willing to make eye contact. A yellow, predatory grin splits his fishbelly-pale face.

“Ridin’ a horse,” he says, “an’ I’m willin’ to bet, still without any sorta papers, an’ carryin’ a gun.” More than one, but Django is hardly going to mention that. “I heard all about yer draw, boy. You shoot a white man in this town, an’ you ain’t even gonna live to see the hangman’s noose. That little wife of yours gonna be on her hands an’ knees washin’ what’s left of you outta the gutters.”

Django has just about had it with bad odds. Sighing, he climbs down from Tony’s saddle, puts his pistol on the ground, and raises both his hands. He doesn’t have it in him to be scared anymore. If they toss him in the cage with the other slaves, chances are they’ll miss the derringer up his sleeve and he’ll have his opportunity when they’re outside of the town, away from the sour eyes and eager trigger-fingers of the various white folks gathered outside their doors to witness this sad spectacle. “You gone call the sheriff on me? Would save us both some trouble.”

Hicks slugs him in the face. He goes down hard in the dried mud and the slaver has one boot on the small of his back, wrenches his wrists up and roughly ropes his hands and feet together. While he’s still reeling from the pain, he’s tossed like a sack of potatoes into the back of the cart. He slumps against the bars and waits until Hicks is finished hitching Tony to the cart before he starts working at the bonds.

Five pairs of eyes turn in his direction. “What?” he snaps.

“Where you get that fancy suit?” one of the slaves asks.

The suit is a mess. He’s a mess. It’s easy to forget that stripped of his expensive clothes and his horse and his guns, he would look no different than the filthy, broken wretches around him.

“Took it from a white man’s wardrobe before I done blow up his house,” Django says, and the others laugh until Hicks rides up beside them and rattles the bars. Django rubs his face into his shoulder; he can feel his jaw starting to bruise.

They make it to the cemetery at the outskirts of the town before the wagon draws to an abrupt halt.

“Good afternoon, gentlemen,” he hears.

Django scrambles to twist himself around, pressing his face into the bars of the cage. He’d almost be convinced that he’s lost his mind, except that the other slaves are clattering around the cage, trying to get a better look at the man seated on a black horse, ridiculously dressed for a hot August day in a three-piece suit nearly identical to the one that was shredded to pieces by shotgun fire, a bowler hat perched on his head. Were it not for the silver-tipped cane at his side, Django would think they’d somehow been riding backwards all this time to that moment in the forest when Schultz had picked him out of a line of shivering slaves.

“Hello, Django,” Schultz calls out cheerfully.

One of the men hisses, “Who the fuck that?”

“That,” Django says with a measure of relief, “be the cavalry.”

“I believe that there has been some sort of misunderstanding,” Schultz says. “By a set of circumstances far too complicated and dull to relay, I am in fact in possession of this young man’s freedom papers.” He takes them out and waves them, and of course that was what he was doing in town despite being barely able to walk, let alone ride.

“You see this?” Hicks says to his companion. “You let in too many foreigners, an’ this is what you get. Goddamned softhearted, mush-brained horseshit.” His hand goes to his pistol. “That nigger o’ yours gots hisself a taste for white man’s blood. He’s a goddamned animal. He’ll turn on you next when he runs outta robbers, you’ll see.”

“Oh, I highly doubt that,” Schultz replies. “But regardless. I would ask you to please unlock that cage and release my deputy without delay.”

Django has the ropes around his hands mostly loosened, his wrists slick with sweat and blood. He lets out a quiet whoop of triumph as he tugs first one hand and then the other free.

“Fuck,” Hicks manages to somehow draw the word out into multiple syllables, “them freedom papers. Them words ain’t mean nothin’ more than the paper they’re printed on.”

Schultz gives a soft little laugh, one that’s meant for Django, who alone understands that it promises death. “I must admit,” he says, tucking the papers back in his waistcoat. “I was hoping you’d say that. A moment, if you would.” He draws out a leather-bound notebook and flips through the pages; even from this distance, Django knows what’s written on it. “I also have here a bill of sale, signed by Mr. Dicky Speck—that would be one of the Speck Brothers, the slave traders, you must have heard of them—for young Django, to myself, at the price of, what was it, one hundred and twenty-five dollars. You are frowning—” This, Django guesses, is directed at the slaver, though he can only see the back of the man’s hat. “It is a bit much, but I assure you he’s well worth it.”

“Git yer ass outta my way,” Hicks growls.

“Ah, but you see I cannot. If you fail to recognize the validity of this man’s claim to freedom…” The ropes around his ankles are easier; in addition to the derringer, the slaver managed to overlook the Bowie knife in his boot. “Then, by default, you are attempting to abscond with my legal property. Perhaps your companion might enlighten you as to the usual penalty for stealing another man’s slave?”

The pistol’s out, but Schultz pulls off the silver handle off his cane, swings it up to his shoulder, and fires. The side of Hicks’ head explodes, showering the slaver and the edge of the cart and the scattered white crosses with gobbets of blood and brain. Django reaches his arm through the bars, slides the derringer into his hand, and shoots the slaver in the back of the neck.

Every face in the cage turns to gape at him. Django mimes the gesture of holding out bound wrists, then goes to work on the bonds of the first man who breaks out of his stupor to do the same. He’s halfway to freeing the second when Schultz rides around to unlock the cage door.

“Took you long enough.” Django tosses the knife back at the men. 

“I had business in town. You were supposed to wait at the cabin.”

“Got bored.” Django unhitches Tony and swings into the saddle. “Nice cane.”

“I thought you would appreciate it.”

Legally vindicated or not, they ride like hell until they reach the wooded hills. 


	9. wanted

When it’s apparent that no one’s following them, Django says, “We need to stop.”

Schultz had hoped to delay this moment until they’d reached the cabin, to sentence all three of them to exile in one swift blow, but he supposes that now is as good a time as any. He pulls up on Fritz’s reins. His horse bows low to help him step off more easily, but his side still wrenches when he hits the ground and he grinds his cane into the dirt in an effort to steady himself.

“Django,” he starts, and he’s reaching for the paper even as Django pushes him up against a tree and kisses him hard on the mouth.

Schultz can think of a hundred reasons why this is a terrible idea, and he starts to formulate all manner of protests, but all that comes out of his mouth is a surprised “oof!” and his free hand, instead of pushing Django away, clings desperately to the back of his jacket.

He’s wanted this. He’s spent his feverish nights thinking of little else as he tossed over in bed, trying to ignore the itching of his healing wounds and the sounds of Django and Hildy taking what they could of each other’s bodies when they thought he was asleep. He wants it now, as Django kisses a path under his jaw, down his neck to suck at his Adam’s apple, slides his hands underneath the preposterous suit jacket, accidentally jarring the jagged scar under his ribs.

“Ow,” Schultz says.

“Sorry, sorry.” Django strokes his side, just above the bulk of bandages, and Schultz melts into his touch. “We shouldn’t do this here.”

“You have a wife,” Schultz says. “We should not be doing this at all.”

Django groans, and he looks so beautiful, the sharp planes of his face outlined in the red and gold of the dying sun, that although he can feel the heat closing in on them, although soon Django’s name will be on the lips of every bounty hunter and lawman in the South, although he’s come to care for Hildy and the frail, tentative bond they’ve forged together, he thinks that there isn’t a thing Django could ask him for that he’d have the fortitude to deny.

“I had a wife before,” Django says lamely.

“That was different. I didn’t know her then. I could imagine—” He shakes his head. The burden he carries is as distant as voices above the surface of a lake to a man drowning below.

“She’ll forgive me,” Django insists between the scrape of tongue and teeth and beard. “Anyone would.” He takes Schultz’s face in both his hands, and just stares at him, drinks him in, as if he isn’t a man past his prime, haggard and grey, entirely too thin and very much in need of a barber’s services. Kisses his lips with a tenderness that no one would ever suspect a man like him of possessing, then drops one hand between the older man’s legs. There are only so many disavowals someone can make when his cock is straining at his trousers. Schultz arches into the touch, seeking out more friction, more contact, and Django grins. “You want this. Don’t tell me you don’t.”

Schultz closes his eyes. The ornate silver tip of the cane digs into his palm as he braces himself, and he tries to focus on that minute annoyance instead of on the way every nerve in his body rejoices at Django’s touch. “More than you can know,” he says. “But Django—”

“If it’s about Hildy, that’s between me an’—”

“It isn’t about Hildy,” he says, even as he’s cursing his own sense of timing, and Django’s, and that of various law enforcement agencies, and his own aching cock. “This is of utmost urgency.” He forces Django away while his entire body screams in protest at him, and digs through his papers for the handbill. Django unfolds it, eyes tracing over that same illustration of that same damned runaway. “I do not believe anyone outside of the post office has seen this yet.”

The fire goes out of both of them, just like that, and Django sags against the tree beside him. He leans his head into Schultz’s and sighs.

“I thought we would have more time,” Schultz says.

“Ought to have a stick of dynamite in that picture. Or a shotgun, ‘stead of some fucking bindle.”

“At least the reward is respectable,” Schultz replies, “For $3000, I would consider bringing you in myself.”

Django laughs and folds up the handbill. “You couldn’t take me alive, white boy.”

“Alas,” Schultz says, “I would not need to. Shall we collect your wife and make for the hills?”

At the mention of Hildy, Django draws away from him, but Schultz clasps his wrist. “We will talk about the rest later,” he says.

“Promise?”

“Providing we live that long.”

Django hoists himself back into the saddle and rubs at his swelling jaw. “They got my name right,” he mutters. “That’s something.”

“We must be grateful for small mercies,” Schultz agrees.

He isn’t at all.

 

* * *

 

But there isn’t time to talk about it, not when other, more pressing matters need their attention. 

Django owns a bedroll, several guns, the rapidly disintegrating clothes on his back, and a horse. Hildy owns even less than that. It takes them ten minutes to pack, most of that time spent with Gus shoving jerky and sacks of oats into the saddlebags out of concern that they, or the horses, will go hungry. Django privately thinks that if the men inevitably on their trail are even slightly as talented as Schultz, none of them will live long enough to starve.

Heat lingers on his lips, and he glances up every so often to catch Schultz watching him. He knows it’s his own fault for taking a goddamned pickaxe to the walls they’d carefully put up since coming down off those mountains, and even still, he can’t quite regret it. He’s come unstuck, rootless, and he doesn’t even ask Schultz where they’re going when he gallops off on Fritz at a pace far faster than a man in his condition ought to be riding.

They ride all night, until D’Artagnan starts to favour a leg, and then they find a rocky outcrop and shelter behind it. They can’t risk a fire, and besides, it’s almost dawn. Watches are arranged—he insists that it’ll only be him and Hildy, and volunteers to take the first shift—but of course none of them can sleep.

“How fucked are we, Doc?” he asks.

“There are perhaps half a dozen bounty hunters in this part of the country who are as good as I am, or better,” Schultz replies. It doesn’t sound like much, six men maybe combing several states for him, but Django is immediately reminded of just how many people Schultz has managed to track down and kill all on his own. “You need not entirely despair,” he adds, “they are looking for a man traveling alone, a veritable monster who by this description must be seven feet tall, grotesquely scarred, and armed with several small cannons. A well-dressed servant with his master—” his mouth twists as though the word itself is sour to him, “—and a beautiful young woman may not draw the same sort of attention.”

Django takes out the handbill and reads it again, this time slowly, tracing his finger over every word. There’s no mention of Schultz. The description itself could have only come from Cora or one of the other domestics after the Greenville authorities questioned them, and they’d all seen Schultz blasted across the floor of Candie’s study. He’s not sure whether Cora’d left Hildy’s name out of it from some last bit of sympathy for her or because no one had bothered to ask, but she’s not mentioned either.

He feels a pang of guilt. He could have left them back with Gus, and run on his own, and they both would have been safe. But it’s much too late now, and besides, he knows them well enough to be certain they’d never have agreed to it. He fiddles with his dwindling supply of cigarettes before deciding that the occasion calls for one. The smoke calms him, steadies his head. “Means you still a bounty hunter, right?”

“Despite my copious crimes, I remain a sworn officer of the courts.”

“So you can still kill folks.”

“I believe I have aptly demonstrated that, yes.”

“An’ if you bring in a body, you still get paid for it.”

Schultz tugs at his beard. “My boy, you may have missed some of the finer points regarding the typical conduct of a fugitive with a $3000 bounty on his head.”

“No, listen. You said it yourself—they lookin’ for me, not you. They gonna know all the same roads you do, the ones runaways and Injuns use, and that’s where they gonna think I be. They ain’t gonna expect me anywhere near a bounty hunter bringin’ in dead bodies all regular-like.”

Schultz scoffs, but Django can see that he has the man’s attention, and Hildy’s too, though she’s gone quiet. “You really want to do this?” he asks finally.

“I ain’t much for hiding,” Django says. “An’ I think you gonna keep me safer than them mountains will.”

“Hildy?”

Her eyes reflect the orange tip of his cigarette as they track the whorls of smoke across the clear night sky. “Could use some more practice with my aim,” she says.

“That’s my girl.” He turns to Schultz. “You ain’t up for much, I know that. But you can find folks, and you can claim a bounty on ‘em after I kill ‘em. An’ if they get me anyway, least it won’t be cornered in the woods like a goddamn animal.”

He remembers what Sheriff Gus said, that Schultz wasn’t always on the right side of the law, and maybe because of it Schultz will understand his position now. The older man nods. “Someone will find us,” he says, “eventually.”

“Then,” Django says, “we die richer.”

 

* * *

 

Which is how Hildy ends up crouched on the roof of a saloon, rifle aimed at the entrance of the whorehouse across the street. 

“You sure this is a good idea, baby?” she asks Django.

“I seem to recall you wantin’ target practice,” he replies.

It’s not an easy shot. Once Schultz had determined that Coleman Finney was in town, and frequenting this particular establishment, she’d had the idea that she could pass herself off as a prostitute with the derringer concealed in her skirts, entice him up to one of the rooms, and shoot him in private. Django had raised all sorts of arguments immediately, from the fact that their target’s victims were all white to the chances of Hildy’s face being recognized, and they’re all good enough reasons that she doesn’t demand he reveal the real one.

Finney is a small man, fidgety, and he must sense that he’s in some kind of danger with the way he looks around himself, like he’s expecting something to jump out at him from the shadows. She’s nervous herself, bracing the solid weight of the rifle but against her shoulder. Django kisses the back of her head.

She has him in her sights, but the madam of the whorehouse is ushering him in, and the sulfur yellow glow of the gaslights play tricks in the gathering twilight. The barrel trembles, just barely, but she can’t risk killing an innocent woman for $35, and so she errs too far to the left and the bullet shakes up a cloud of dust by Finney’s foot. His head jerks up and the madam runs for cover, and her second shot takes off his bottom jaw, and it’s only when he drops, limp and staring on the wooden steps, that she remembers to exhale.

They’re flooding out now, whores and townspeople and finally the sheriff, and Django draws her back into the shadows. The slope of the saloon roof hides them from view, and in the commotion, they’re able to slide onto the first floor balcony and shimmy down the wooden beams to the ground below. It’s an effort to walk and not run, but Django’s hand on the small of her back keeps her calm, and she tells herself that everyone in town is looking the other way.

They don’t say a word until they make it to camp and crawl into one of the tents, and then he puts his hand on the rifle and says, “I can take that.”

She says, “The hell you can,” running her hand up and down the barrel like a caress, and then he gets that spark in his eyes that makes her all too willing to lay the rifle aside for now and put her hands to other purposes.

“We got time?” she asks.

He looks up from where his head is pillowed on her breast. “Time enough,” he says, and she flips them over so she’s on top of him, hair loose around her face, tugging at his belt and her trousers while he fumbles with the buttons on her blouse. Her heart’s still racing in a wild drumbeat like it wants to escape her ribs. She’s exhilarated, half sure she’s going to faint, but every inch of her skin alive to his fingertips.

She bites on his ear, then whispers, “Is it like this for you?”

“Yeah,” he says. “Sometimes. I mean, maybe that’s why—” He cuts himself off, but not soon enough to stop the images from coming, for her to think about him and Schultz entwined together in the dark, of sex and death and the scent of gunpowder, and that ought to leave her cold and angry but does just the opposite. She grinds against him, her fingers tugging at his tight curls, and the shudder of his release echoes through her body until she collapses against his chest, boneless and sated.

She must have drifted off, because the next thing she’s aware of is Schultz clearing his throat outside the tent. She flushes and gathers the shabby wool blanket to her half-undone blouse as Django struggles to put his trousers back on and throws open the flap.

“Ten for us,” Schultz is saying, as though he’s blithely unaware that he’s interrupting anything. “Fifteen for you, my dear, given that your sharpshooting brought our man down.”

Hildy presses the wrinkles out of the bills he hands her until they’re nearly straight. Feeling suddenly timid and more than a little out of her element, she says, “Never got paid for nothin’ before.”

“It’s an appalling business,” Schultz says, and he holds out the piece of paper that’s given them leave to kill a man.

Hildy takes it and folds it over so she can’t see the dead man’s face anymore. Somewhere, someone like Schultz—someone like her, fierce and ruthless and _free_ —is reading a handbill just like it, with Django’s name on it. Someone is loading a rifle and the shells are marked for him. 

“For luck,” Schultz says, and smiles at the bitter irony of his words. He stands outside their tent perhaps a second or two longer than he should, then limps away to his own.


	10. possibilities

 

A digression. 

There are five bounty hunters who never find Django Freeman, and one who does (though he’s not, in the end, the man who claims the reward). The warrant that marks Django for the lawman’s gun or the hangman’s noose is posted in the offices of sheriffs and marshals, folded in pockets and crumpled in saddlebags, lies soggy in the muddy banks of the Mississippi and is even bled on when one bearer meets a messy end on the wooden floor of a saloon in Macon.

Five men track twisted paths through the woods, following the North Star, tracing rumors of the Underground Railroad and colonies of escaped slaves in the marshlands of Virginia and North Carolina. Django’s joined with Indians in Florida and fallen in with outlaws in Utah. When the heat wave strikes in late August (a setback for anyone whose work involves the transportation of human flesh, living or dead), two of the men meet in a tavern and console each other with the knowledge that at least once in every bounty hunter’s career comes a mark that can never be caught, a ghost that will haunt him until the end of his days.

Handsome Jack Stone, however, thinks these men are fools. And it is only his copy of the warrant we need to concern ourselves with.

Back in ‘40, he’d staggered out of the Battle of Plum Creek with four notches in his rifle and one across his face that had earned him his nickname. If there was one thing the Comanches had taught him, it was that all men, red or white or black, die just the same way, ugly-like and shitting themselves, but the same on the inside for all that. A man doesn’t ride for the north just because he’s a slave and that’s what slaves do, not if it doesn’t make sense for him to do so. A slave’s still a man after all, still got a body that wants to live and breathe another day, and any slave that’s fought hard and dirty enough to get a $3000 bounty on his head isn’t so stupid as to do exactly what’s expected of him. Regular slaves steal away in the dead of night. They don’t shoot their masters in the heart or blow up plantations, so it only stands to reason that such a slave might, upon becoming a fugitive, travel a different sort of path than all the others. 

So while five other bounty hunters search for an escaped slave, Stone visits a plantation in Chickasaw County, looking for Django Freeman. 

That’s where the Greenville sheriff directed him, and he waits in the parlor for the plantation’s newest slave, a large woman with a pleasant face and nervous manners, acquired for $200 when she turned up at the market, her clothing in tatters and her skin smeared with ash. She smoothes her skirt and smiles wanly at Stone from where she sits on the high-backed chair across from him.

“Y’all must be Cora,” Stone says, and he sees that the woman is terrified so he keeps his voice low and even. “How you like your new home?”

“I like it a lot, Mister Stone,” she says, with a deference practiced over a lifetime of servitude. Still, he thinks, she’s stronger than she looks if she walked away from the disaster at Candyland unscathed.

“Your master tell you who I am an’ why I’m here?”

“You here lookin’ for that Django fellow.”

“I am indeed.”

“He far from here, Mister Stone, an’ if he as smart as they say, he ain’t never comin’ back to these parts.”

“Of course,” Stone says, stretching his long legs over the carpet. “But the question is where might he have gone?”

“I don’t see how’s I’d know that, Mister Stone.”

He rubs at his jaw, at the base of the jagged scar that traces from the bottom of his chin to the corner of one eyebrow. More than a few women have told him that he ought to grow a beard to cover it, but he earned it proud and it’s not like a beard will cover the wreck of his nose and cheek. “Ain’t many still living who’ve met him,” he says, “so alls I got is your word on his character. What do you know?”

Cora talks. He thinks, perhaps, that she was waiting for this chance to unburden herself, that the horror she witnessed has slept curled inside her for too long, that she longs to release it into someone else’s hands. He motions for one of the girls to bring her sweet tea, and he smokes a cigarette and listens, nodding when she pauses.

Which is how he learns—because it isn’t mentioned anywhere in the warrant—that this Django was never a slave at Candyland, isn’t a slave at all in fact, but is perhaps a slave trader or a bounty hunter himself, depending on who you ask. (Stone, it must be said, has never heard of a black bounty hunter, but he’s willing to allow for the possibility that one exists.) Cora herself isn’t clear on the matter, but she says he talked back to the white men and held himself proud like no slave ever did. She describes the massacre in breathless gasps, says that she was spared only for the color of her skin when her mistress was gunned down in cold blood. This is how he learns that Django had a wife, though Cora last saw her dragged out to her cabin by her hair and doesn’t know what became of her, and had arrived at Candyland with a white man who wasn’t his master.

“And this white man?” Stone prods.

When he hears her response, only his constant poker practice keeps his surprise a secret from her.

Stone knows Dr. King Schultz more by reputation than anything else, though he once lost a card game to the man down in Austin and had, up until now, fancied him one of his more serious competitors in the race for the $3000 bounty. Cora is sure he’s dead, mostly sure that he and not Django fired the first shot in the massacre, and entirely unclear as to what he was doing travelling with Django in the first place. “Monsieur Candie said at first it was about his mandingos, but that weren’t the case, and it was somethin’ to do with Hildy—that’s our Broomhilda, I mean—instead an’ it were all confused, ‘til the shootin’ started.” 

She starts crying, then, and he passes her a handkerchief and waits patiently for her to compose herself. He tells her that she’s been terribly helpful, and she latches onto his praise, even thanks him when he promises to get justice for her dear Miss Lara. Then he uncoils himself from his chair and strides into the foyer to shake her new master’s hand.

He’d known a former outlaw once, released after ten years in prison. He’d have expected the man to relish his freedom after so many years of deprivation, perhaps to get as far away from town as he could, but he didn’t move more than a short walk to the prison gate, and swallowed his pistol a year to the day he’d become a free man. Stone looks back at the curved back of the sobbing woman in the parlor, and can’t quite say why he’s reminded of that old convict.

“Take good care of the girl,” he advises.

Armed with his rifle, the warrant, and above all, what she’s told him, he swings up onto his bay mare’s saddle and kicks up dust along the long dun road.

 

* * *

 

 

But it’s some time still before Stone will find them, and in the space that remains, there are nights like this one. 

The moon hangs swollen and low above the peaks of the Great Smoky Mountains, and Hildy stares up at the scatter of stars, at Odin’s Wagon, and listens to the song of the cicadas.

The nights are hot and restless. Django is barely disturbed by the tiny cries Hildy makes into the crook of her arm, but she feels terrible that her nightmares put him out at all when none of them can catch much sleep. Most nights, she doesn’t sleep much. She’s lain in worse places than the bedroll out beneath the night sky, her head cradled on Django’s chest, but in her dreams she’s curled in the hotbox or under Big John’s bullwhip, and if she can manage to remain awake, she’s still a free woman.

She’s past feeling ashamed. It’s no weakness, not when she knows that even the strength of the two men beside her gives way in the darkness. Django buries his own night terrors somewhere deep, but even still, he twitches beside her and though they never talk about it, she knows he understands. Schultz, the last of his laudanum long used up, is nearly as bad as she is. He babbles in German too garbled for her to translate, and his fingers clench and unclench in the rocky ground beside his bedroll. When it sounds particularly bad, Django untangles himself from Hildy’s limbs and goes and sits at his side, stroking his back until he’s quiet and calm again. 

But now Django’s asleep and she isn’t, and she pulls her knees up to her chest and cautiously, as if she were taming a wild horse, puts her hand on Schultz’s cheek, closes his mouth with her thumb. His eyes open, pupils wide and black.

“Hush,” she whispers, then, “Don’t be wakin’ everyone up now.”

“Did I wake you?”

She shifts to sit against the edge of a rock. “No. Got plenty demons of my own.” And if she’s come to like him, she hasn’t forgotten that strangeness between him and her husband, but still, she switches to German, asks: “You want to talk about it?”

“Do you?”

She laughs. “Not a bit.” It’s an odd sort of comfort, sitting with him in the dark, a reminder of what her life is not just as much as it’s a reminder of what her life has become. All she’s ever known is the inside of houses, the cramped and cluttered farces that play out in kitchens and slaves’ cabins, cages made of whitewashed pillars and opulent ballrooms. She’d never imagined that the mountains could go on forever like they do, vanishing into deep indigo a shade darker than the sky. Her thin arms are mosquito-bitten now, her palms marked by calluses, her skin tightened by the heat of the sun. There’s muscle now where she’d had only softness before, in her arms and shoulders where the rifle sits, in her legs, which no longer ache nearly so much after a day’s ride. She’d not be mistaken for a house slave anymore, even without the scar on her cheek. She’s something different, a weapon forged anew, shining for the brief moment it blazes hot in the fire.

Neither her draw nor her aim are as good as Django’s, but she can nearly keep up with Schultz, and there are fifteen dollars in her pocket that she earned herself, wrapped in the portrait of a man who won’t rape another rich widow, all because of her. Tomorrow morning they will ride out in search of the Lafferty Gang, as if Django isn’t himself marked for death, as if they have all the time and freedom in the world.

And in the dark, possibilities make themselves known.

“You might have stayed back with the sheriff,” she says to Schultz. “There was no need for you to get yourself involved in Django’s troubles.”

“Nor was there for you,” he replies, “and yet, here we are.”

“You love him,” she says, and it ought not to be so difficult to say. He’s already told her as much, after all, even if it hadn’t been in English. “Not—not the way you love a brother or a son. But like you might love a woman.” 

He’s silent for so long, the way he only gets when he’s taking aim at a target and can’t think of much else, that she worries she’s offended him.

“I don’t mind so much,” Hildy adds quickly. “If it had to be someone else, I’m at least glad it’s you.”

“Brunhilde,” he starts, but she puts her finger to his lips again.

“They are coming for him,” she whispers. “No matter what we do. We weren’t ever gonna walk out of this alive.”

“No,” he agrees. “I had hopes of spiriting you both away, but it appears we are well beyond that.”

“Promise me—” and she can’t quite finish, but she doesn’t need to. He puts his hands on her forearms and stares at her with those grave, too-kind eyes.

“That I will draw my last breath fighting for him? That whatever happens, dear Fräulein, neither one of you will live in chains. Surely I do not need to say this out loud.”

Because it’s dark, because she’s a creature reborn from the fire, and because if they are well and truly fucked, all things are permissible, she leans forward across the space between them and kisses him. It’s tentative, the landscape of his mouth unfamiliar, but far from chaste. He doesn’t move at first—perhaps she’s misunderstood him, perhaps he’s some sort of man who doesn’t like women at all—but then he slides his hands up her arms to draw her close to him, then buries his face where her neck meets her shoulder.

They stay like that for a long time before he parts them with an apologetic little half-smile. “Still,” he says, this time in English, “you have an excellent aim, and it would be vastly preferable to have our lives, our freedom, and a large sum of money, would it not?” 

Something stirs and unfolds inside of her, and she recognizes it though she refuses to name it in any language. “And after?” 

“I had thought my house,” Schultz says, “if the two of you are amenable.”

“You got a _house_?”

“In St. Louis. I did not always live in a tooth wagon.”

Hildy tries to imagine Schultz staying put at all, and fails. “I’d like that,” she says softly, and she thinks it won’t happen, the three of them playing house together in the city with all of Schultz’s lily white neighbors looking on, but she has to admit that it sounds kind of nice.

For now, she can pretend that death isn’t coming for them with a warrant in hand, that the thread that stitches them together will hold against the rest of the world.


	11. triumvirate

As it turns out, Orrin Lafferty’s found himself two more accomplices since his warrant was issued, along with a covered wagon loaded with the ill-gotten proceeds of a streak of bank robberies in Kentucky. Hildy is decidedly unsettled at the sight of eight or so malefactors passing through the valley below.

“That many more for us,” Schultz says lightly, though he’s not without concern. There isn’t the time to do the job properly, not with the law breathing down their necks. Nor does it sit well with him to hang back and let Django and Hildy do most of the shooting. He settles himself on the outcrop overlooking the valley, one hand on his rifle, the other wrapped around the spyglass.

_Be careful,_ he almost says, or _good luck,_ but superstition gets the better of him, and for once, he says nothing at all as they climb down the rocks, scrabbling for handholds and tree branches. 

It’s not mid-morning but the sun is already baking the rocks, settling over him like a stifling wool blanket and beading droplets of sweat on his neck and forehead. He takes off his jacket, spreading it over the bare branches of a tree above his head. It gives him little shade, and his shirt and vest are already soaked through.

He doesn’t pray, hasn’t since that spring night in Düsseldorf when he’d realized that if there was a God, He didn’t care much for the likes of Schultz, but he wishes he had at least more to go on than the stone of dread in his stomach. Django is dwarfed where he crouches in the shadow of a peak, no more than a few feet between him and the sheer edge of the cliff below. Hildy is even smaller, barely a speck without the spyglass, and with it, a leaf held aloft before a swarm of angry hornets.

The caravan halts before her. They’re too far away for him to hear the exchange, but he can imagine it; Hildy breathless and ragged, dressed in clothes better suited for a man, grubby, but there’s only so far dust and dirt can tarnish a beauty such as she possesses. She’s noticed; Lafferty, riding at the head of the convoy, circles as he tips his hat appreciatively. Schultz imagines whistles, taunts from the man. Perhaps she flirts back, more accustomed to surviving by her wits and her body than by her gun. Tilting the spyglass a little to his left, he can see the muscles in Django’s arms tense, his finger inching into the trigger.

Schultz tells himself that he can wait. They both can.

She’s light on her feet, running an appreciative hand across his horse’s flank, twirls in an almost-dance, and Lafferty leers out so that he’s practically nose-to-nose with her, and that’s when the derringer pops out from inside the loose sleeve of Hildy’s blouse and Lafferty’s head jerks up backwards, blood spurting from his shattered eye socket.

Everything is chaos.

Hildy drops and rolls under the wagon, away from the guns that immediately turn on her and the frenzied limbs of Lafferty’s riderless horse. Django takes down three of the men before any think to look up; having given his position away, he clamors down the mountain pass, firing his pistol as he goes, the return fire from Lafferty’s gang gouging out chunks of rock and blasting holes in the wagon’s canvas hood.

Schultz picks off the remaining men methodically, shielding Hildy and Django in a rain of bullets, his rifle spewing fire and scorching hot shell casings. The rebound kicks into his side, but he grits his teeth against the pain until none of the outlaws are moving, until Hildy crawls out from under the wagon and she and Django throw their arms around each other, blood branching in rivulets through the caked dust on their skin.

The ache, watching them together, has nothing to do with his wounds. He has no right to intrude on this; were it not for the warrant, he could slip away now and leave them to their bliss.

Still. He never claimed to be a saint. He takes his jacket from the tree and folds it neatly over one arm, slings the rifle over his shoulder and slowly, laboriously, makes his descent down to the valley below.

 

* * *

 

Schultz returns to their campsite a few hours later with the spoils of war: the wagon, shot-up but emptied of corpses, one of the packhorses, several bottles of whisky, bags of oats and sundry provisions, and an IOU from the marshal promising the $6000 bounty on Lafferty and his gang within the week. He loathes the idea of staying in one place for so long, but arguing the point might well have drawn more attention than not. Not to mention that even a crooked lawman might be unlikely to try to cheat a bounty hunter who, despite age and obvious infirmity, managed to bring down a gang of notorious outlaws without so much as a speck of blood on his impeccable suit.

The heat is unrelenting, the overhang of the canvas offering no respite from the sun’s sweltering blaze and the buzz of flies over the dried bloodstains inside the wagon. Likely as not, the heat wave will deter most other travelers; it’s not, he thinks, weather to murder in. All but the most dogged or desperate bounty hunters will be tempted, as he is, to find some quiet shaded place and wait out August’s last onslaught.

They’ve camped by a stream, and he sees Django first, chest-deep in the middle of the water with the soggy remains of Calvin Candie’s fine suit yards away from him, drying out on the rocks. Hildy’s on the shore, unbuttoning her blood-stiffened blouse; as she turns towards him, it slips down one smooth brown shoulder. She glances down, gathering the fabric in one fist, not quite swift enough to preserve her modesty.

Schultz does her the courtesy of turning away, pretending to find the new packhorse tremendously interesting, and so he doesn’t see that she’s approached him.

“It go fine in town?”

He nods, still avoiding looking at her directly. From the periphery of his vision, he notices Django watching them both. “We’ll have to wait some time for the money, but that’s not unusual for a such a sizeable reward.” There’s the whisky in the back of the wagon, and that might serve as a distraction. She takes a drink from the bottle, one-handed, the other still clutching her blouse closed, and he watches the long line of her throat as she swallows.

“The water’s nice,” she says when she hands it back to him, and he drinks in nervous sips. Hard liquor has never been his preference, but he’ll take any diversion he can get. With one hand free, she takes him by the wrist and walks him to the shore.

“Fräulein,” he says, stiff and formal and her giggle is the sound of wind chimes.

“Doc,” she drawls. “It’s hotter ‘n hell.” Half-faced away from him, she releases her grip on her blouse, and it slides loose, past her shoulder blades, past the roadmap of scars carved into her back. “’Sides, Django and I both seen you in your altogether, an’ you already seen the worst part of me.”

It’s as much of an invitation as he’s ever going to get, and the whisky makes him braver. He peels off his vest and shirt in short order. She’s in the water, thrashing her bloodied clothes in the stream, by the time he’s unbuttoned his trousers and folded his things in a neat pile on the rocks. Feeling tremendously exposed, he wades in after her, the bottle clutched like a talisman in one hand. She laughs again and swims out to Django. Whispers something in his ear in the private language of husband and wife, then they both look up at him as if on cue, and she stretches out her hand and motions him closer.

Schultz stands in the stream, the current lapping at his bare skin, digging his toes into pebble and silt. Stunned, all but paralyzed at the prospect that he’s permitted this. That they are all alive, beneath the blistering sun, and free. The water is cool and soothing against his scars, carrying the weight of his tired body as he slogs his way out towards them.

Django drains the rest of the whisky bottle and casts it at the shore. Turns to Schultz, and with a devilish smirk, says, “Took you long enough.”

He kisses Hildy deeply, his mouth devouring hers, one arm circled around the small of her back. His other arm loops around Schultz, tugs him closer until he can feel the warmth of Django’s side, the swell of Hildy’s breasts tight against his chest. Django kisses him, his breath hot, lips bitter with whisky, and Hildy sucks and bites at his neck.

“This what you want?” Hildy asks, though he’s not sure whether she’s asking him or Django. “Both of us?” 

No one answers, so they can still blame the whisky, the terror and relief of the gunfight, the searing heat. There are, Schultz thinks as he’s caught up between the two sinewy, exquisite bodies, less elegant solutions than this one.

“We should talk about this,” he mutters, because he’s never quite learned when it’s best to shut the hell up.

“Think there’s better things to do than talk,” Hildy says, splashing water at him. He rubs at the droplets sluicing down his face and splashes both of them back. Django smiles, not sardonic and guarded as he’d been down in Mississippi, but one of those rare, mercurial smiles he’d give in his first nights of untested freedom, when they’d built snowmen in the mountains and Schultz had told him half-remembered stories by the fire.

And then they’re both holding him, and each other, and he’s submerged in their embrace, long limbs twining together so that he’s not sure where one begins and the other ends, whose hand traces the curve of his spine, whose fingers tease at his cock. As off-balance as he is, he tries to reciprocate, planting soft kisses across Hildy’s collarbone, skirting his fingertips across the ridged skin of Django’s back.

“You been so good to us,” Django rumbles in his ear. “Don’t even worry ‘bout nothin’. We got ya.”

He’s struck with the sudden terror that it’s an exchange to both of them, freedom for intimacy, payback for his near-fatal quirk of conscience. His life since coming to America has been a string of transactions; the closest thing he has to a friend someone he, however briefly, bought and owned. And then the man had gone and somehow opened his heart, not with the certainty of a key turning in a lock but with the violence of a sharp knife rending flesh.

He can’t ask this to mean more than it is, drunken, clumsy fumbling between three colliding bodies, bent into each other the way the scraggly trees at the highest mountain peaks come to grow around stone. And still, he falls into them, held upright by the push and pull of the current, and lets them take him apart.

 

* * *

 

After, they lie together on the shore, Schultz cradled, his eyelids drooping shut, in Django’s arms while Hildy, propped up on one elbow, twirls a long strand of his hair between her fingers.

“Prolly ain’t right,” Django says.

“Baby,” Hildy reminds him, “we kill folks for a living. If we goin’ to hell, it ain’t cause of this.”

“You trouble, girl.”

“Says the man with a $3000 price on his head.”

“We could move to Utah,” Schultz says drowsily, “I’ve heard the Mormons practice comparable debauchery.”

“There many bad folks there?” Hildy asks, just as Django’s about to ask what debauchery means. Schultz shrugs. “But we good together. We good?”

“We are.”

 

* * *

 

They blaze a crimson trail across Tennessee and Arkansas.

The stories start in the cotton fields and log cabins, passed on like maps to the North in nighttime whispers. There’s a grey man on a black horse, and with him a tall black cowboy with an R burned onto his face. But it’s the woman they speak of most—for it’s the women who tell the stories—the fierce angel of death arisen to smite the rapists, the murderers and torturers and overseers. Of course someone scoffs—whoever heard of a black killing a white, let alone a black woman killing dozens of white men?—but the story survives the way hope does, a tiny flame poured out of the Drinking Gourd and kindled in the heart of every woman who toils beneath the whip.

And while five other bounty hunters are searching for a frightened slave, a dumb brute of a creature fleeing for the free states, Handsome Jack Stone listens to the mutterings and rumors and nonsense and stabs his Bowie knife, over and over again, into a crumpled map. While five other bounty hunters scour the wilderness, he visits sheriffs’ offices and asks after the handbills that are no longer posted on the wall.

Thus the ghost becomes a man, a crippled German who seems far too frail to be responsible for the pile of corpses left in his wake. Dressed in grey, yes. Alone, at least when he comes to collect, but the hills and forests keep their own secrets. Interested, it seems, in this Django Freeman, enough to always take the warrant with him.

At night, Stone runs his finger up and down his pockmarked map, and watches his road take shape.


	12. harvest

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Contains some discussion of abortion. Also gratuitous porn.

Before it all goes to hell, there are the few sweet weeks during which everything is right with the world.

The heat falters, stealing away the lush green of the leaves and leaving in its place arterial red and dying brown; cool, crisp nights where they huddle together on the bedrolls and breathe in the vegetable decay of the forest. It’s time enough for the crackle of leaves and twigs beneath the horses’ hooves, for tentative touches exchanged beneath the thick fur blankets, their soft cries turning to puffs of fog.

In someone else’s life, it’s the beginning of the cotton harvest. Django doesn’t know what day he was born. On the plantation, he marked the passage of the years by the seasons; when the fields turned white, he’d know he’d grown older. Schultz declares that everyone ought to have a birthday, and comes back from town one afternoon with a good winter coat for him. It’s a year since they met, a year that Django’s been free, and that’s enough like being born to count for something.

(The war creeps closer, a whisper in the saloons and plantations. Soon, the desolate farmland they ride through, abandoned to spoiled soil, will be drowned in blood.) 

Django knows that this is only a strange fever dream; it won’t last, and they’ll face their own reckoning before the year turns. He’ll pay for his transgressions. There is an order to the world, and he’s broken it. Freedom, more money than he’s seen in his entire life, and the wild, reckless love that makes him wake up in the dead of the night and pull Hildy and Schultz close to him to reassure himself that they’re real: these are not things that a man like him is permitted to keep for long. It’s a miracle that he’s been allowed to experience them at all.

There are still borders he dare not cross. He speaks to no one but Hildy and Schultz; the only other souls he sees are the men he kills. They keep a stack of warrants with his name on them that seem to appear every time Schultz collects on a bounty, and these paper the walls of his prison. His is a small sort of freedom, but it’d big enough to contain his wife and his best friend and vast wilderness, and he tells himself, most nights, that it’s all he needs.

 

* * *

 

When they catch up with Wylie Stockton it nearly goes bad. He leads them on a merry chase through an Arkansas bayou, so thick with cypress that neither Hildy nor Django can get a clear shot. She’s up to her knees, slick mud cold as it sloshes inside her boots, when a large hand reaches out from between the moss-crusted tree trunks and slams her into the freezing muck.

He hauls her up, spluttering and choking on duckweed, and slams her into the thick trunk of a cypress. Stockton might have grown from the marsh himself, wet and bedraggled as he is. His teeth are the color of weak tea and his famous coat is waterlogged and tattered. His hands around her throat, thumbs digging in beneath her chin, she can well believe he’s the monster the warrant made him out to be, savage enough to kill a lawman without compunction, let alone a black woman off by herself in the sodden depths of the swamp.

He twists her head to one side and, in stark contrast to the forceful grip he’s got on her neck, traces one finger over the scar on her cheek as tenderly as a lover’s caress.

“Pretty girl.” His breath is sour against her face. “Where you run away from?”

She tries to get a shot off with the derringer, but it must be plugged with mud. He slaps her hand into the tree bark and pins it tight there.

“None of that.” His gaze travels over her, assessing the rifle hanging by her side—useless at this range, even if she could get free from him, and probably stopped up just as bad as the derringer. Her pulse drums in her ears. “Where’s a slave get a thing like that?”

“She ain’t no slave,” Hildy hears, just as a jet of blood erupts into her face. Django does like he’s supposed to and checks for a pulse—not an easy thing, with the way his bullet ripped open Stockton’s throat—before he’s helping her to dry ground, running his hands over her to check for injuries.

“I’m fine,” she says, pushing down the fluttering in her stomach. “Gun’s stopped up is all. Get the body before the mud does.”

It’s no simple task to drag the corpse over tangled roots and frosting bog; it takes both of them tugging and occasionally digging a foot free where it’s caught in the mud, and by the time they reach the wagon, her arms and back are aching and she can’t feel her toes. Stockton’s head dangles loose, nearly severed by the shot, and it thumps against her shoulder as they load him into the back of the wagon.

Schultz hobbles over to the campfire to start the teakettle boiling. Hildy and Django strip off their filthy clothes and wash up as much as they can in a stream barely cleaner than the swamp water before joining him. He hands her one of the mugs and she inhales the steam and almost forgives him his immaculate suit.

She runs over the chase in her head, trying to decide on when it had gone wrong, when she’d been too slow or too careless, but she keeps coming back to Stockton touching the side of her face, how he’d seen right through the rifle and the fringed suede jacket to the past when she’d cowered under Big John’s whip, seen right through to the core of her.

“Ain’t ever gonna escape it,” she murmurs into her tea. She rubs the scar on her cheek, as if she could erase his fingers on the raised, branded skin. “Had me pegged right away. Like I weren’t nothing.”

Schultz and Django exchange glances. Django moves her hand away from her face, runs his thumb in slow circles over her palm, and Schultz curls around her back to let her lean into him, nuzzling her jaw. 

“He dead,” Django says. “You ain’t.”

Schultz’s hands rub up and down her freezing arms, and warmth blooms under his touch. He hesitates a moment, brushing up against the first button of her blouse. “May I?”

She chuckles, low and throaty; can’t quite believe he’s as reticent as he is after she and Django made it quite clear what they’d like from him. She helps him along, eager to get her mind on something other than the dead body in the back of the wagon. As she shrugs off her top, she feels his fingers hover above her back as if asking for permission.

“Go on,” she says. Of course he’s curious. Candie was right about that much; it’s a wonder it’s even taken him that long to ask.

But it’s his lips that follow the gnarled scores that criss-cross her flesh, tracking a long, slow path over her skin, feather-light and reverent. She doesn’t move, can’t, wouldn’t want to anyway, not until he’s ended the journey at the small of her spine, his beard tickling her ribcage.

“Oh, Brunhilde,” and there shouldn’t be that pain in his voice, as if he were the one flayed by the overseers whip, “every mark on you, every scar, is a badge of strength.” He lowers her onto the fur throw, changing places so that it’s Django who holds her head in his lap while Schultz winds his way across her bared breasts, licks down her belly and works to unfasten her trousers. “You fought,” another kiss, below her navel, and he slides her pants down. “You would not be caged. You resisted, and you outlasted them all.”

His head disappears between her thighs, and at first she doesn’t understand what he’s doing until his tongue laps at her sex, prods and sucks at the secret places in her that send tremors through her body. She twists, knees buckling around him, moans upwards into Django’s mouth. Her fingers fist at her sides, flex and grapple for his hairy forearms. She clutches at him and whimpers and shivers until he’s wrung every last drop from her. Django drags him up and kisses him, and both their lips, when they find hers again, are wet with her taste.

She’s limp and quaking, but she can tell neither of them are close to finished, both watching her expectantly. She’d jump on either of them if she could, but her legs won’t quite obey her, and a wicked idea takes root.

“I want to watch,” she says, and heat rises to her face. “I mean. Whatever it is you two do together.”

Django looks down, almost bashful, which for some reason Schultz seems to find hilarious. “The lady wants a show,” he says. “What do you say, my boy? Shall we give her one?”

“Both of you gone be the death of me,” Django says without much conviction, and yanks his shirt up over his head. Hildy rolls herself up in one of the furs and watches the two men undress, laughs at how Schultz folds his clothes neatly in a pile and pushes them out of the way before looping his arms around Django’s back and claiming his lower lip between his teeth. They’re both kneeling in front of her, fingers mapping out planes of muscle and bone, of skin pale and dark, whole and broken and lit by flames. Django traces a finger over Schultz’s side, and Hildy can see the thick, ropy scars there, uglier and deeper than her own. They must hurt him even now, much as he tries to hide it. “You sure you up to this?”

“I trust you,” Schultz says, and sinks into the blanket, dragging Django down on top of him. Hildy watches her husband move over the older man, reaching between their legs to clasp their erections together. Schultz sighs, like he’s _needed_ this, and his hands travel the length of Django’s back, over corded, rippling muscle, to cup his ass and press their bodies closer. He manages to hook one leg over Django’s, his foot sliding down the length of Django’s calf, hips bucking up underneath him despite Django’s best efforts to be gentle.

“Shh,” and it surprises Hildy; she’d thought two men—these two men in particular—together would be rough and ungainly, but Django touches him like he’s made of glass. “Lay back. Let me do the work.” 

“Then do some work, son.”

Django parts his legs and scoops melted tallow from the lantern by his head. Excruciatingly slowly, he works his finger into Schultz’s body. It barely looks like anything from where Hildy’s lying, but Schultz gasps. “Something like that?”

“Yes, yes. Exactly like that.” 

Django grins, and he does something with his fingers that makes Schultz rasp out incoherent little noises. The arm closest to Hildy flops out and she takes his hand, kisses the back of his knuckles. Django’s deliberate, as confident with his hands as he is with his gun, and judging from the pitiful keen that escapes Schultz’s lips, nearly as deadly.

“Please,” Schultz whispers, and there’s a throb between her own legs at watching him, so accustomed to being in control, suddenly vulnerable and wanton. Django doesn’t need more encouragement than that. He angles himself onto Schultz, stroking his hair at his hiss of not-quite-pain, nips at his neck, rocks into him. He’s all lithe, feral grace, ringed in flames, and Hildy’s mesmerized by the play of fire light as his hips roll and thrust, by the smell of their arousal and the heat that radiates from them. Schultz is every bit as vocal as she’d imagined, mewls out _more_ and _harder_ and _fuck me_ , and _pardon the vulgarity, Fräulein_ , disintegrating into a rapid stream of German that, from what she is able to catch, is impressively filthy. The reminder that she’s there, that they’re showing off for her, has her dripping wet again.

Django shudders and cries out and collapses on top of Schultz’s chest for a moment before easing out of him, stretches like a cat and then curls his fist around the other man’s cock. Hildy can see how close Schultz is, his head thrown back and his eyes half-slit, panting for breath, and she curls in beside him, holds him tightly and murmurs in his ear while Django strokes him to completion.

None of them speak, after; words will only remind them that there’s a clock ticking on their freedom and a dead body in the wagon. Instead, she lies in the sticky aftermath, her head buried against Schultz’s shoulder and Django’s arm wrapped around both of them, and thinks that the three of them together might violate every law of God and man but if so, she’d willingly go to hell to do it a few more times.

 

* * *

 

Later. The bayou is never silent; frogs call out the last steps in their dance before the winter, and the cries of owls echo through the cypress. Nothing is still; the forest stirs and rustles and never sleeps. “You awake, Doc?”

“I wasn’t.”

Django’s turned around in his sleep, sprawled messily over the furs. Hildy untangles herself from his long limbs and wraps one of the blankets around her shoulders. She hears Schultz pad after her to the edge of the camp where the horses are tied. It’s cold, but it’s allowed now for her to squish close to him and rest her head on his chest. 

There are no secrets between any of them, she thinks, except this one.

It’s easier in German, both because the shapes of the words are already alien and ill-fitting and because even if Django wakes, he won’t overhear their conversation. “I am going to have a child,” she says.

He doesn’t need to ask why there’s so much sorrow and fear in her words, why she’s telling him first and not Django. “Are you sure?”

“It’s my time,” she says. “And there’s no blood.”

“Is it—” but of course he doesn’t need to finish, which is more or less the problem.

“It ain’t yours. Couldn’t be.”

“That was not what I was asking.”

“I know what you’re asking.” 

He covers her hand with his. Her eyes grow hot, and there’s no point in trying not to cry. “Fräulein, if you need, there are ways. Less dangerous than the ones you are thinking about. If that is what you want.”

Hildy wants the open sky, her hands clutching the reins as D’Artagnan gallops over the hills, her hair streaming behind her in the wind. She wants the fingers and tongues and cocks of the men by her side, their ferocity and their kindness. She wants blood and fire and revenge. She wants the milky scent of an infant in her arms, born into freedom and somehow the child of each of them, and she can’t see how she can have any of it, let alone all. 

“That ain’t what I want,” Hildy says.

“It’s not safe out here,” Schultz says. “Not for a baby, or—if you change your mind about having one. I can collect the money in town and we can ride north. Tomorrow.”

“Settle down.”

“Not forever. That would be a waste of a good gunfighter. Talent such as yours should never be squandered.”

Tears are streaking down her face, but that still makes her smile. “And if it ain’t Django’s?”

“It will at least be yours.”

“All of ours,” she corrects. “Prob’ly be a hell of a shot.” She heaves one last sob. She feels wrung out, exhausted, but at least unburdened. “Tomorrow,” she says, and it seems like enough of a promise.

 

* * *

 

The Pine Bluff sheriff is ripping down the poster of Wylie Stockton when Stone strides through his door, rubbing warmth back into his frozen hands. He’s tracked over half the state, a strange sort of bounty hunter searching for handbills that aren’t there.

“Caught your man?” he asks.

“Not me,” the sheriff says. “One of your lot.”

“How long ago?”

The sheriff looks confused, but he reaches for a pocket watch and, winding it, checks the time. “Couldn’t be more’n a few hours.”

“He in town?”

“Stockton? Out around back, but I don’t see as you’ll get much out of him. Fellow’s near got his head blown clean off.”

Stone wonders if the man is intentionally playing him, or whether he’s just impossibly thick. “The other bounty hunter.” 

The sheriff shrugs. “Didn’t seem like the sort to stick around. Prolly ain’t got far, though.” 

He’s come close before, all but stood in his quarry’s shadow only to find that Schultz has blown out of town after collecting some ridiculous sum of cash, and without any indication that he’s not travelling alone.

Today, though, luck is with him, and Pine Bluff is bustling, with sailors disembarking from the steamers and painted ladies blooming like flowers in their bright petticoats outside the swinging saloon doors, beckoning the strangers inside. It’s an afternoon to slip in and out of town unnoticed, if one is attempting to duck the attention of anyone less eagle-eyed than Handsome Jack Stone.

His scar doesn’t dissuade the whores; despite the mutilation, he’s tall and lean and dressed like a man with money to spare, and he nearly regrets that instead of seeking out the feminine company that would happily have him, his concentration must be focused solely on a man of middling years and unsteady gait, limping up the steps into one of the saloons. 

Stone might have had a wife by now, children, a house larger than the one-room shack he keeps down in Texas. He’s nearly as old as Schultz and has been at the game much longer. But he’s honest with himself—a necessity when one’s own company is all one has—and he knows well enough that moment when he’s cornered his prey, the thrill of recognition when a man knows he’s done for, the cold, uncompromising justice of the gun, is a greater pleasure than any human companionship could ever bring him.

He strides into the saloon, triumphant.


	13. frost

It’s a familiar enough scene.

A man walks into a saloon, and everything about him tells you he means to start trouble. His pale eyes stake out the room from beneath the brim of his hat, and the tomahawk scar that slashes across his face twists his mouth into a perpetual grimace. The small cluster of men playing cards at a table pause to study him; the middle-aged whore at the bar rearranges her crossed legs and adjusts her garter. The music stumbles for a beat before the piano player—the only soul in the saloon not to glance up at the stranger at all—continues to play.

Stone is a patient man, or at least he allows himself to be patient when there’s neither an obvious back door nor a last-minute rescue in sight. He lets Schultz finish the tune and in the meantime, orders himself up a whisky and sips it at the empty table nearest to the piano. He pushes out the chair across from him and, once he has Schultz’s attention, gestures expansively to it.

Stone’s purpose made clear, the card-players can return safely to their conversation, though the odd wary peek is tossed in his direction. Schultz climbs to his feet and places first his hat, then a half-full pint of beer, on the table, and sinks into the chair across from Stone. He twirls his cane idly in one hand, as if it’s merely an affectation. 

“Walkin’ pretty tall for a dead man,” Stone says.

“Who told you I was dead?” Schultz takes a swig of beer. He doesn’t look well; the cane aside, he’s lost weight and the creases in his face are more pronounced than Stone remembers, but he sounds cheerful enough. “Your name is Stone, yes? From Texas.”

“One and the same.” 

“Ah, I thought I saw you, wandering about the street. I seldom forget a face, let alone one as, er, _distinctive_ as your own. Still in the corpse-collecting business?”

“Seems we both are, Doctor. Seems we both been chasing after the same bounty, in fact.” 

“Not Stockton, I hope,” Schultz says with a groan. “I would have been more than happy to let you have him, had I known you were nearby. Three days spent stomping through the most revolting swampland and the sacrifice of a perfectly good suit to the mud, not to mention the mosquit—”

Stone’s forgotten that Schultz, given an opening, will never shut up. “Not,” he drawls, “Stockton,” and pulls the handbill—one of the few remaining copies, considering Schultz’s apparent penchant for collecting them, and flattens it out on the table.

Every man has a tell. He’s tempted to believes that the way Schultz smoothes his fingers over his mustache might be his, but Stone’s seen him clean up at poker so he doubts it’s anything that obvious.  Regardless, it’s about time to play his hand.

“Way I hear it,” Stone says, “You been tracking this feller across three states.”

Schultz might not have looked nervous at the sight of the handbill, but he definitely does look relieved at Stone’s words. “That one,” he says carefully, pressing a finger over the thick letters offering $3000 for Django Freeman’s head, “you would have to fight me for.”

“At least,” and Stone leans closer so that their faces are almost touching. Schultz is bluffing. If Stone had any doubts before, they’ve evaporated now. He’s a good actor; Stone will give him that. His pleasant smile doesn’t falter even as the color drains from his face. “That’s one story.”

Schultz blinks. “Pardon?”

“Because to hear Calvin Candie’s slave woman tell it, you ain’t so much huntin’ him as partnerin’ up with him.”

“My good man,” Schultz says, “I believe you have been misinformed. Might this have been the same slave woman who told you I was dead?”

“She seen you take a hit, that’s for certain. You ain’t doin’ so good, Doc. Maybe you ain’t dead, but you sure as fuck ain’t rackin’ up piles of corpses when you can barely walk from piana to table.”

“The rifle is a great equalizer of men.”

“So much so that even a field nigger is playin’ bounty hunter these days?” 

“I assure you,” Schultz says. “If I knew where he was, I’d be $3000 richer.”

“That ain’t what I think,” Stone replies. “I think you know exactly where he’s at. I think the two of you murdered Calvin Candie and near everyone else down on that plantation and then blew it sky-high. An’ I think you still got him doin’ your killin’ for you, and that means he ain’t gone far.”

Schultz sits back in his chair and takes another sip of beer. He knows he’s caught out, but Stone’s never known a bounty hunter to surrender before the bullets start flying. “Step away,” he says. Quiet. Deadly. He’s ridiculous but Stone is aware of just how many men he’s killed.

“Come again?”

“I said,” Schultz repeats, “step away. Let this one go. Count him among the handful of failures that you have no doubt accrued over the course of your career.”

“Or what?”

“Or I’ll have to kill you,” Schultz says, as lightly as if he were inviting Stone to tea. 

“You’d hang for it.”

“Then it appears we are at a détente,” Schultz replies. “I am also, you understand, a humble representative of the court. In a country as rife with lawlessness as this one, it would be a pity for us to kill each other and thus deprive the justice system of its two most competent servants.”

Stone snorts and rolls a cigarette on the table, offers one to Schultz, who shakes his head. “I don’t got no reason to kill you, Doc. Ain’t no money in it, for starters, and I don’t got no wish to hang for killin’ a lawman. Alls I want is for you to take a little ride with me to a quieter place. See if your friend Freeman don’t come lookin’ for ya.”

“What makes you think he’d do that?”

The thing about clever men, Stone figures, is that the cleverer they are, the dumber they assume everyone else to be. Schultz, if even half the stories about him are true, is just about the cleverest motherfucker Stone’s had the misfortune to encounter, which means that he probably thinks that Stone is an imbecile. “Call it a hunch,” Stone says. “He didn’t leave you to bleed to death in Mississippi now, did he?”

Stone strikes the first match. It’s a dud. The second blazes up the tip of his cigarette, and he rolls the smoke around in his mouth, savoring the taste, before sucking it deep into his lungs.

“Don’t ‘spect I’ll get too far, threatening your life. Man like you ain’t got much to be scared of. So here’s how this goes. We walk out together now, all friendly-like. Colleagues. Partners, even. I let this feller at the bar know exactly where we headin’, so your boy knows where to find you. An’ when he comes, I put a bullet in his head, nice and quick.”

Schultz manages to turn what Stone is fairly sure is murderous outrage into little more than a raised eyebrow. “What on earth would make you believe I would ever agree to such an arrangement?”

Stone puts his elbow on the table and wraps one arm around Schultz’s neck, like they’re two jovial old friends sharing a secret, like both of them aren’t packing enough weaponry to kill the other several times over. “Because if you don’t,” he whispers, “I’m a tell everyone in this here saloon who I’m lookin’ for an’ what the price on his head is, an’ that he shot up a whole buncha good white folk to earn it. I’m a tell ‘em that he’s hidin’ out somewhere close to town. An’ they ain’t gonna kill him easy like I will. They gonna tar an’ feather him, whip him, maybe cut his balls off first. You know what them hillbillies are like. Your boy gonna die either way. You want him to die screaming or so fast and peaceful he don’t know what hit him?”

Schultz’s eyes scan across the room. Some of the men are taking a little bit more interest in their conversation. He slumps, and Stone is almost disappointed that he’s so easy to break.

“It will not, I presume, make any difference to you that every man he killed thoroughly deserved it.”

“Doc,” Stone says, a laugh undercutting his voice because to hear some tell of it, Dr. King Schultz has never shown a whit of pity towards any mark, “it’s just business.”

He’s fairly certain that Schultz, even were he so inclined, can’t exactly make a break for it, but he keeps a chary eye on him nevertheless as he sidles up to the bar. He introduces himself to the saloon keeper and rattles off directions to a cabin he’d scouted out upriver—should anyone come to town looking for him, or for his new acquaintance. “An’ if I don’t show up prompt every evenin’ to partake in your libations,” he adds, “you tell the sheriff to round up a posse and come find me there.” He waves the handbill like a proud standard.

Schultz, at least, waits until they’re out behind the saloon to try to kill him.

He’s fast on the draw, but Stone’s stayed close enough to slam his arm out of the way before he has a chance to pull the trigger, and one well-placed jab to his injured side is enough to drop him, wheezing, into the dirt.

“I’ll have yer guns now.” He presses the toe of his boot into Schultz’s wrist. Reluctantly, the man releases his grip on the pistol. “An’ the other one.” Stone kicks him, vicious and efficient, when he takes too long to think about it. “You can ride or I can carry you,” and so he collects the derringer, several knives, and, after close examination, the silver-tipped cane loaded with a single shotgun shell. He admires the old guy’s tenacity. If he’d ever been the type to split a bounty with a partner, Schultz wouldn’t have been a bad choice. It’s unfortunate that he’s somehow gone soft in the head over a mad-dog slave. 

He hauls Schultz up onto his horse, then hops up on his own, kicking his spurs into the beast’s sides. The cabin, and the endgame, wait for them.

 

* * *

 

There are indistinct noises in the swamp, bubbling up over the insect buzz and the murmur of wind in the trees. With every hour that Django hunches and smokes and watches Hildy polish the guns and doesn’t sleep, they grow more and more like human voices, like the clattering of shackled feet through the cold slurry.

Hildy’s focused on the Remington, her slender hands oiling the barrel so that she can all but see her reflection in it, and he might have been proud of how tough his girl’s become, if he weren’t so terrified.

“Be happy,” she’d said when she’d told him, and smiled so sweet that at least for a few moments he actually had been. But that was before night fell, before Schultz had been gone for hours, and Django knows he already has too much, that a child is only one more thing he’ll love and lose.

There doesn’t need to be much more talk between them now. Django says, “He might be waiting for the money, if the sheriff don’t have enough,” but he’s sick with the realization of why she’s cleaning the guns, with what’s put that stony determination on her face.

“He was ready to run,” Hildy replies. “Money or not. Said it ain’t safe here.”

Django doesn’t say, “He coulda run off,” though maybe that’s exactly what a regular man would do. Doesn’t suggest running off themselves, even if that’s exactly what sane people would do. There’s only one conversation they need to have out loud, and it’s what happens if he goes into town and doesn’t come back.

“Ain’t gone be like that,” Hildy says.

“Well,” Django says, “it ain’t exactly the preferential option.”

“Because we both goin’.” She crosses her arms over her chest, defiant, the derringer concealed in her sleeve. “One of us got his name on a handbill, an’ it ain’t me.”

“One of us is carryin’ a child,” he protests, though the child in his mind is hazy, an unnamed sorrow that lies ahead if he lives long enough to mourn.

“I was carryin’ it yesterday too,” she says. “We go together. An’ you stay outta sight, less you got no other choice. I can do this.”

He knows he’s already lost them both; they are already ghosts to him, distant and insubstantial, drifting away the more he tries to hold onto them. He knows that he is dead too, that the real world is one of fetters and sharp cotton bristles and bullwhips, and he’s ceased to exist in it, become more story than man, and no one survives a thing like that.

Still, he’s not one to leave a scab unpicked, and so he finds himself agreeing. They will leave in the morning if Schultz doesn’t come back, in daylight when the busy streets offer more protection for a pair of freed blacks on their own, when papers can be shown and questions asked. It’s not the wisest of plans, and he’s sure Schultz would have had a better one, but it’s better than them each dying separate, never knowing the others’ fate.

They cling to each other in the tent, make love soft and slow, and every touch of her hand is laden with grief even as she whispers hope. He falls asleep with her promises in his ear, and wakes to find the space beside him empty and cold.

 

* * *

 

“You were a soldier, yes?” 

The light that bleeds through the gaps in the logs tells Schultz that it’s morning. His muscles are stiff and aching, his wounds screaming with reawakened pain, his back straight against the hard wooden chair. His hands, bound behind him, have long since lost feeling; given the tightness of the ropes, it’s a small mercy.

Somewhere in the bog, Django and Hildy will have already decided that it’s more than a simple delay that’s kept him in town. He wishes he weren’t too selfish to hope for them to leave him behind.

Stone paces from one end of the cabin to the other before apparently deciding that there’s no reason to remain silent when it’s clear neither of them are going anywhere. “Gonzales Rangers under Captain Caldwell,” he says. “You?”

“Committee of Public Safety,” Schultz says, and at Stone’s blank expression, adds, “Mine was a very brief and bitter war, without ranks or uniforms. But we do not leave these things behind easily. While it may be impolitic to mention it, I notice that you haven’t slept either.”

“Hell if I’m dumb enough to turn my back on you,” Stone says, “I don’t doubt you’d find a way to put a bullet in it.”

Schultz casts a glance at the array of weapons propped up against the wall. With enough strength, he could probably topple the chair over, but despite his best efforts, his wrists are chafed but no closer to being freed from the rope. He’s almost flattered that Stone considers him a threat at all. 

Stone hasn’t laid a hand on him since tying him up, and Schultz almost believes that the man has little interest in harming him. He’s a means to an end, and at the moment, an amusing distraction until Django comes walking right into an ambush. “Slave boy with a gun ain’t somethin’ you see every day.” Stone sounds almost conversational, as though they’re in the saloon comparing strategies. “Must have caught a lotta marks by surprise.”

“Does that offend your sensibilities?”

Stone shrugs and sprawls out on a chair too small to contain his lanky build. “We ain’t so different, King. Soldiers and businessmen both. You an’ I both know what’s in a man, guts and bone and blood and maybe a little money, if yer lucky. Ain’t nothin’ special about a white man ‘cept the law says his life’s worth more. That offend _your_ sensibilities?”

“On the contrary, I admire your consistency.”

“What happened to you, anyway?” Stone asks. “Time was, you’d take a man down before the ink dried on his handbill, no questions asked or fucks given.”

_Django happened,_ he wants to say, _then Hildy did,_ though if he were inclined to confession, it wouldn’t be to his captor, wouldn’t be here, now, at the very end. Stone doesn’t deserve to know what it’s like to be unmade by a veritable force of nature, to have the flame he’d thought extinguished at the barricades in Düsseldorf rekindled just when he’d convinced himself he was dead inside.

“A man doesn’t shoot his own partner,” he says instead.

“Wouldn’t know,” Stone replies. “Never had one.” He settles himself on the chair, long arms folded over his knees and lights another cigarette. “Ain’t none of this gonna last. Soon’s them slaves figure the same as your boy did, all them plantations gonna burn jus’ like Candyland. ‘Til then, though…”

He turns abruptly, wreathed in smoke, at a noise outside. Calmly, steady as his name, Stone lifts his gun and aims it at the door. Schultz manages to scream out a warning before the rifle butt slams into his temple and he’s knocked onto the floor. A fresh wave of agony rips into his side, and black swarms at the edge of his vision, but he has just enough time to see that it’s not Django kicking the door open, derringer in hand, turning the world upside down.


	14. spark

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kind of graphic torture in this bit.

Later, with bruises swelling her skin and blood dripping from her broken mouth, roped to the chair with its wooden back digging in between her shoulder blades, Hildy will reflect that there was a damned good reason why Schultz and Django made it their general practice to shoot from a distance.

Her heart pounds once, twice, between the moment she kicks the door and the moment she faces the barrel of an Enfield Carbine, and it’s not enough time to be sure that she’s shooting at the right man, let alone to squeeze off a good shot. It’s more luck than skill that of the three bullets she fires, one manages to tear through his right hand and so the blast that goes off next to her ear clips a lock of her hair and nearly deafens her instead of carrying off half her skull in a spray of pink. 

He’s on her in a flash, wielding the rifle like a club; the barrel strikes her throat and she chokes around it. She brings her knee up to catch him in the fork of his legs, but it’s not enough to shake him off. His fist crunches into her jaw. As he rises for another blow, she curls on the floor, arms wrapped around her belly. There’s a crack as the rifle slams into her ribs, and she thinks herself a fool for thinking that she could protect any of them, Schultz or Django or the child inside of her.

He straightens as soon as she stops moving, but she’s taken a beating before. She breathes through the sting of it, through the constriction in her chest and bone-deep bruises, rises to her hands and knees and throws herself against his legs, knocking him off-balance, clawing at the rifle with the last of her strength. He bashes her into the wall and a dull thunder of pain crashes across her spine. It’s only now that she can see his face, austere and nearly comely—were it not for the scar—eyes bright, hungry. His wounded hand leaks blood down her arm.

Crushed beneath his weight, she spits a loose tooth into his face. The slap across her cheek is nothing; it’s worth it to watch the gobbet of red slide down his chin. As though he could hurt her now; as though anything could. No longer a princess, a bounty hunter, a valkyrie; she’s just a woman, starved and beaten and exhausted, but still a free woman for all her suffering.

“Aren’t you the little spitfire,” he says, and the gunshot still reverberates in her ears, deforming his voice into distant echoes. “I gotta say. I can’t wait to meet yer husband.” He manhandles her, none too gently, across the floor and forces her into the chair. There’s not quite enough rope so he unfastens the coils binding Schultz to his chair—for the seconds he’s untied, she lets herself pray that he’s awake, that he might be strong enough to save both of them—and ties them back to back. If she twists, she can just make out the smear of blood at his temple, the array of yellow and purple bruises down the side of his face. She’s able to wriggle her fingers enough to feel the back of his hand, the skin there sticky with drying blood.

“Don’t think we’ve been properly acquainted.” Her captor bends down to be level with her, adjusting his hat back onto his head before he rummages through his things to find a strip of bandage to wind around his hand. “Jack Stone. You must be Mrs. Freeman.”

She doesn’t want to talk to him but she’ll be damned if he takes her name from her too. “Broomhilda Von Shaft,” and if her voice quakes, well, one could hardly blame her. 

“An’ you ain’t willin’ to save us all a lotta pain an’ time to just tell me where yer husband’s at?” 

“Don’t worry,” she replies, “he’ll find you.”

He laughs. “Oh. I do like you, girl. You ain’t got the slightest clue the hell you just brought down, but you give a damn good fight.” His uninjured hand strokes her jaw, thumbs her split lip. “But you ain’t no outlaw. You give up that killer man o’ yours, an’ you can go free. Both of you.” He reaches across her to shove Schultz, who groans and stirs a little. Hildy’s breath catches in her throat, and she strains again to look at him.

“I had to try,” she says in German.

At first she thinks he’s still out cold. Then he says, “Our mutual friend?”

“Probably on his way.” 

Stone slaps her again. “Speak English.” She barely feels it through the ache that burns through the very core of her body, but Schultz comes to life, suddenly furious, struggling against the ropes. “Oh, _interesting_ ,” Stone says. His fingers press against her belly and she flinches; there’s barely a swell but she’d curled up to protect herself when she might have fought, and a man who makes his living hunting people would have noticed that. “Whose is it? His, or your husband’s?”

“Mine,” Hildy snaps, if the tiny heart even still beats inside her, if the life she’s carried on her long, desperate journey isn’t on its way to gushing out between her thighs.

Stone moves out of her frame of vision, over to Schultz. “An’ here you are, mad for another man’s wife. King, you utter _dog_.”

“Ain’t like that,” Hildy says, and would take the words back if that would stopper the laughter that bubbles up in Stone’s throat. She hears him light a cigarette, inhale, exhale, a nearly indistinct wet pop as he takes it out of his mouth. A sizzle as it’s extinguished into flesh, ripping a strangled cry from Schultz’s lips. For an instant her vision goes red and all she can think is to get free, get her hands around Stone’s neck and throttle him until the last breath is squeezed out of him.

“Oh,” Stone says, “I think it’s _exactly_ like that. Tell me—” Another strike of a match and its accompanying sulfur; another scream, though this one is weaker than the last. She stretches out her fingers as far as she can, brushes them against his knuckles in a faint mimicry of a caress. “—does Django know what kinda folks he’s about to give his life for?”

“Keep him talking,” Schultz says to her in German. It earns him a punch that she feels in her own bruised back, and he gasps, but she can feel his hands twisting in the ropes, a trickle of fresh blood slicking their skin. She swallows hard; if she can buy them time, they might be able to get free. Between the two of them, they’d have a chance—vanishingly small, but a chance nevertheless—of taking him down.

It makes sense, but she can’t force herself to speak, hearing the hitches in his breathing, the screams dying into tiny whimpers of distress as he fights to stay conscious. “This your game, then?” Hildy asks. “Torture him ‘til he gives up where Django at? It won’t work. Django prolly already outside, gettin’ ready to take his shot.”

“He won’t get that far.” Stone sounds confident, and he’s likely right. It took her half a day to find the cabin, and only because no one in town knew her name or face. Django’s description, vague as it is, would have been spread around. He’d avoid Pine Bluff if he could, and without directions from someone there, the wilderness held a multitude of potential hiding places. “Not with a posse in town lookin’ for him. A posse that gonna be here, soon, if I don’t make my regular appearance. Boy’s dead either way, but it’ll go faster if one of y’all talk.”

What he means is that he won’t have to split the reward with twenty other men if Django falls into his ambush. She nudges Schultz; she feels him nod against her head. It’s possible to outlast this man. If they can get free before his reinforcements arrive, his greed alone might save them.

“You ain’t gettin’ nothin’ out of us,” Hildy says.

“Ah, yes. You can endure pain, you showed that.” His bloodied Bowie knife appears next to her eye. She flinches, but forces her head to remain still, every breath slow and deliberate. He won’t kill her, she thinks, not if she’s supposed to be bait, not if there’s a chance that Django will get the upper hand and he’d be required to hold a gun to her head in order to save his own skin. “But I reckon,” he drags the knife across her face, beading droplets of blood that roll down her chin like tears, “a few minutes of hearin’ ya scream is gonna make him give up his partner real quick.”

She’s about to say that she won’t, and then Stone wrenches up their bound wrists and slams the tip of the knife under her middle fingernail to pry it away from the flesh. There is nothing in the world except for the blaze of agony that arcs up her arm, the searing in her eyes, and the sound of her own scream as it’s torn from her throat. She can feel Schultz try to pull their hands free from Stone’s grip, but there’s a sudden jab of the knife and his hand goes limp. There’s hardly a pause before he’s moved to her ring finger, slicing through the nail and the unprotected skin beneath. She curses the tears that stream down her face; they betrayed her at Candyland and they will betray her now.

“Feelin’ more conversational?” Stone asks. “Or does the girl need to lose a few more fingernails?”

Schultz says, “You’ll have to excuse these Southern rubes; they don’t know how to treat a lady. I imagine he’s much more accustomed to sheep.”

Stone drops her hand to strike him, hard enough that his head snaps back against hers, and she’s suddenly glad she can’t see what’s happening behind her. It’s bad enough to hear Schultz whimper as Stone visits whatever cruelty on him that he’d meant for her.

“Stop,” Hildy sobs out, “please, just stop.”

“You know how to get me to stop.”

She hears Schultz whisper in German, “Be strong, Fräulein,” and she nearly laughs, that even now he’s trying to console her. She thinks that it takes more strength to endure the lash than to wield one. She bends her maimed fingers back to twine into his, and though there’s more blood than voice at her lips, breathes out:

_Wie ist die Welt so stille,_

_und in der Dämm'rung Hülle_

_so traulich und so hold_

_als eine Stille Kammer,_

_wo ihr des Tages Jammer_

_verschlafen und vergessen sollt…_  

Hildy sings, the lullaby transformed into an anthem of defiance, as Stone rages, as the blows fall upon them both, until the pain swallows the melody and only silence remains.

 

* * *

 

Stretched out over a thick tree branch, Django stares through the spyglass at the dozen or so armed men surrounding the cabin, and mimes shooting each one in turn. It’s taken him most of the day to find this place, circling the town on foot in a widening spiral, through the creeks and marshlands until the sight of Fritz and the wagon, roped to the porch of the cabin, stops him in his tracks.

The cabin’s boarded up—recently if the fresh, straight planks on the windows are anything to go by. For all he knows, there are another dozen men inside. The men surrounding the cabin look too clean to be outlaws. It’s not hard to see the trap; it’s a rookie mistake, otherwise, to leave Fritz in plain view, and there’s far too much firepower around for a rookie.

Whoever’s in there, it’s Django they’re waiting for. Schultz, Hildy, even the fools outside with their rifles and chewing tobacco are all just so much bait.

He closes his eyes, breathes in the scent of pine needles, the last of the sunlight warm on his face, the tree bark rough under his palms. It’s absurd; he can’t remember a time when he felt so alive, so agonizingly aware of the blood rushing through his veins and the pure strength of his muscles. He thinks of Carrucan, and the girl in the yellow dress who’d been the light behind a burst-open prison door; of a lantern in the forest and the grey stranger who’d come across him chained like an animal but had talked to him like he was a man.

With every possible shot, every angle, every permutation, he loses in the end, but he can’t help it. He wants to live. It’s just that there’s other things he wants more.

_Time to walk through hellfire._

This is the part that’s easy: the inhale of breath, stilling his ribcage, the squeeze of a trigger, a man’s head smashed to pieces below. They’re all running and Django slithers down the tree trunk, and though every instinct screams at him to flee for the murky shroud of the swamp, he takes cover behind another tree and fires until he’s out of shells. One man is almost on him before he drops his rifle, draws his two pistols from their holsters and pours them dry.

He counts maybe half of the men still coming at him, a rain of bullets splintering chunks of pine and churning up the swamp water, and there’s a time to be brave and a time when bravery won’t get you shit, so he turns and runs, into knee-deep watery mud that oozes to fill his footprints. Lanterns flash between tree trunks in bursts of blinding light.

Django buries his guns in a pile of dead leaves beside a creek and lowers himself into the muck until just his face is above water. One of the men runs close enough to him that he can make out the shape of a pair of boots above the rotting vegetation. He hears them shouting to each other until the voices retreat farther than he could have run, then die away altogether. Still he waits, shivering, for them to scatter, to give up the hunt or to return to collect their dead.

The stars are out by the time Django gathers his weapons and trudges back to camp. He knows them now, as well as he knows every scar on his own body, but they’re of little comfort in the dark. Whatever men he hadn’t managed to kill are no doubt venting their failure to find him on Hildy and Schultz, if either of them is even still alive.

He crouches in front of the ashes of a fire he dare not light, and rustles through the stores of ammunition. He has a handle on numbers, at least, unless the survivors head back to town for reinforcements. He feeds Tony and D’Artagnan and the packhorse that they’ve been too busy running for their lives to name yet, and he’s preparing himself for the next almost-certainly-suicidal assault when he looks up to see first one pair of bright eyes watching him from the trees, then another.

He’s got a pistol in hand and almost fires before his eyes adjust to the light and he sees that the faces in the trees are varying shades of brown, that the bodies that emerged are dressed in rags, and as they come closer, he can see welts on their wrists and ankles.

“Sure you prob’ly used to hearing this,” a woman’s voice says, “but for fuck’s sake, don’t shoot.”


	15. inferno

It’s not safe to light a fire, but they huddle around the feeble illumination of Django’s lantern. He rubs his hands together in its warmth, flicking drying mud in a scatter around himself. His clothing, slick with mud, sticks to his skin, chilling him to the bone. He must be a horrific sight—all the better to spring out of the woods on the men by the cabin, like some boogieman from their childhood nightmares, just as soon as he can leave the strangers behind. 

There are five of them. The oldest man, named Moses, is maybe 60, his years a series of valleys carved into the leathery skin of his face. The youngest, a solemn child introduced as Little Harry (Django thinks that it’s likely short for Harriet, but he’s not sure if the men of the group have noticed that yet), can’t be more than 12. 

The woman who spoke is Lucy, a portly woman of middling years who seems to speak for the rest of the group. She’s escaped at least once before; the brand on her cheek matches Django’s. The others, a mulatto girl named Dinah and a young field slave named Osborne, are holding hands, and the ache Django feels at the sight of them is the pain of a phantom limb.

“What are you doing out here?” he asks.

“Well,” Lucy says, “we _was_ gonna raid your camp for supplies, but since you here with them pistols, don’t worry yourself about it none.”

“We headed to Memphis,” Moses says. “Then north.” He looks to Lucy for approval, then apparently receiving it, adds, “Wouldn’t hurt to have another strong young man along. Woods is thick with pattyrollers.”

“I got somewhere else to be first,” Django says. “Should be there right now.”

“You look like a man about to do somethin’ stupid,” Lucy tells him.

He snorts. “Tell you what,” he says. “I don’t come back, you can have my stuff.” He hoists the rifle over one shoulder and climbs to his feet. 

“Think for a minute,” Moses says. “We all been listening to patrols searchin’ all through these swamps for you, and there a bunch more upstream. You really gonna take that on?”

“Don’t see as how I have a choice,” Django replies. “My wife’s pregnant and my partner’s hurt bad, and those motherfuckers got both of them.”

“Django—” Dinah starts, but Osborne silences her. “Let him go. Man’s only out for hisself.” Django half-turns, and the young man says, “Yeah, I know who you are. We all know. Ain’t no slave in the South hasn’t heard of you.”

Django lights a cigarette, and his eyes hood; he can feel the change come over him like he’s suddenly in character, a slaver, one in ten thousand and without kindness or mercy. He can see them recoil from him, the way Schultz had done when he let D’Artagnan get torn to pieces in front of them, and he permits himself to revel in it. Better to cut his heart out, to let it wither and die, so he can do this last dreadful task ahead of him. If he sees in them a little of himself, if he pities them or thinks them brave, it will only make abandoning them that much harder. “I see you ain’t impressed,” he drawls.

Osborne stands up; Django has a foot of height on him, but despite it, the kid does his best to stare him down. “You hardly the first nigger to run away. We all run away. Lucy, she run away three times before this. Now you gonna just run off again. Don’t matter what happen to us, right? Don’t matter what happen to anyone, as long as you get what you want.” 

“That ain’t fair, Osborne,” Dinah says, but the others are nodding, and Osborne looks proud of himself.

Django’s hand goes instinctively towards his pistol before he reminds himself that the kid’s harmless, that they’re all miserable and scared and helpless as he is. The mask nearly slips. “I ain’t gonna get what I want,” Django growls, and Osborne doesn’t need to point out that it only makes it worse, that he’s throwing his life away when he might save himself and five more besides.

“They keep sayin’ you some kinda hero,” Osborne goes on. “That you gonna come and burn all them plantations to the ground. Free every slave in the South. You know that’s what they say?”

“I ain’t been near a plantation for some time,” Django replies. He draws a puff off his cigarette; the tobacco comforting, a veil between them and him. “You right though, boy. I ain’t no hero. Someone—maybe once thought I was. But the truth is I’m here ‘cause there was a woman who gave me my first taste of freedom, a woman I loved more than I feared the whip, an’ a man who helped me get free and stay free, and I sure as fuck ain’t gonna go up north and leave them behind.”

“So,” Lucy says. “You against the world.”

“That how it always been.” He almost starts walking again—it’s late, and if he can mount another attack before sunrise, his chances go from nonexistent to incredibly fucking slim—and then he adds, “What you think gonna happen when you go north, anyway? You think you gonna be free? Think you ain’t always gonna be lookin’ over your shoulder? It ain’t how you think it is. You get free an’ from there it’s all just a fight to stay that way.”

It’s more words than he’s said in a long time, and he’s startled at his own voice, so much that he almost doesn’t hear Little Harry squeak, “You think we can’t fight?”

He finishes his cigarette and the smoke dissipates. He blinks, his eyes dry and sore, and sees, for the first time, a child willing to face the lash or worse for freedom. And the others, mistrustful as Django himself is, wary of the gap between the legendary gunfighter and the filthy, desperate man before them.

He thinks, he was wrong. He’s not one in ten thousand. Every one of those ten thousand is a stick of dynamite waiting to blow.

He’s just the match.

Django stalks over to Tony and unfurls the saddlebag where they keep most of their gun collection. It’s nearly as impressive as it had been the previous winter, given their haul from bringing in the Lafferty gang. “I have a proposition,” he says. “Any of you sad bastards ever fired a gun before?”

He tosses a rifle to Osborne, and is startled when Dinah catches it instead. “You point it at the other guy and fire,” she says. “How hard is that?”

Django grins. “Here’s how it is,” he says. “I am going to go back to that cabin, kill every one of them hillbilly sons-of-bitches, and rescue my wife and my partner—or more likely, I’m gonna die trying. Truth be told, I’d rather live. You help me do that and afterwards, I get whoever’s left standing to Memphis or wherever it is you wanna go.” 

He’s aware of five grubby, tired faces staring at him. They have no reason to trust him and even less reason to like him. And he knows it’s a far cry from freeing every slave in the South, but six against the world is better than one. 

“We keep the guns,” Lucy says.

“Yeah,” Django says. “Fine. Let’s do this.”

 

* * *

 

Now that the floodgates are open, it’s as though he can’t stop talking, pointing out the quirks and advantages of each gun, the names of the men they’ve killed, his fastest draws and best distances. Dinah tests the balance of her rifle, squints through the sights at something in the woods; he corrects her posture, ignoring Osborne’s scowl. There’s no time to teach them anything; he can only hope they take to it as easily as he did, or at least that they manage not to shoot him or each other.

He feels a hand tugging on his jacket, and he looks down to see Little Harry’s round face peering up at him.

“You stay back,” he tells the child. “Mind the horses.”

“Fuck that.” Lucy, familiarizing herself with a pistol, gives the girl a stern glare for cussing, but it’s hardly the right time to worry about what kind of salty language she might have picked up since escaping. “I wanna kill me some hillbillies.”

No one seems to really be in charge of the child, so he defers to Lucy. “Kid has a point,” the older woman says. “Ain’t like they won’t be shooting at he—him—on account of his age.”

It doesn’t sit well with Django, but none of this does. He sighs, and takes his derringer out of its sleeve contraption. It’s small enough that it fits in the child’s hands.

“That a tiny gun,” Little Harry says.

“You’re a tiny kid,” Django replies. “Anything else gonna throw you on your ass if you try to fire it.”

Little Harry turns it over in her palm, her face serious and skeptical. “You ever kill anyone with this?”

“I did,” Django replies. “Killed my first man with one just like it.” He squats down and puts a hand on the girl’s shoulder. “Don’t you go trying to play hero,” he says. “But if a man come at you, you defend yourself. Got me?”

He hates the way the child’s eyes light up at the thought of shooting someone, hates the men that put that violence in her. He squeezes her shoulder and stands. It’s time to go.

One thing they are good at, he realizes, is creeping through the swamps without being heard. They’ve all learned how to walk heel to toe so their worn bare feet hardly make a sound. He hears the conversation between the men down at the cabin well before he hears anything from his companions.

Django takes in each face, commits it to memory, thinks it’s not fair that he’s somehow become responsible for them too, that he’s meant to free them just as surely as Schultz freed him. He thinks of the men he was shackled to, abandoned in the woods to bury the Speck brothers, the men in the cage left staring as he rode off in a cloud of dust, even poor Cora who had fled to God knew what fate. He’d only ever asked for his own freedom, and Hildy’s, and it’s only now that he understands that they’ll never be free, truly free, until no one is left in chains.

He wishes he had time for one last cigarette. He stares at the men in the clearing, who outnumber them two to one. He nods to the others, and they fan out, each taking a position among the trees.

He closes his eyes, and he thinks of the mountain creek, his lips on Hildy’s, then Schultz’s, their bodies, scarred and broken but so perfect to him for every flaw, startled by the joy of discovering the ways they could fit together, that they could have reached into the stygian depths of human cruelty and pulled from it something as fragile and precarious as love.

 _I’m coming for you,_ he promises them, draws his pistols and a deep breath, and opens his eyes.

Years later, he will remember only running from the woods, raining hot lead at anything that moved, a pandemonium of men and horses, the rapport of rifle fire and the cries of the dying. The fury in him, stoked and kindled by years beneath the whip, take over and he’s merely an instrument of the gun. The rest will come to him late at night: the way his foot slid sideways in a pool of exposed viscera, how Dinah, red blossoming from her chest, met his gaze before sinking to her knees, how his ears were attuned to every separate shot so when he heard the derringer go off he’d known to whirl and find Little Harry at his back and a man a few yards away taking aim at her.

There’s only split-second before the bullet fires, and a choice that he won’t remember consciously making. He has just enough time to knock her down, and his brain barely registers the scorch of white heat that slams across his back and through his shoulder. He staggers, his left arm suddenly useless with the gun held limp in his hand, manages to just barely turn, raise his right hand, and shoot the man in the forehead.

Before he can stop her, Little Harry runs to the cabin door and pulls it wide open.

The flash of a muzzle erupts from the darkness of the cabin, an explosion that, at this range, would take a man’s head off if there were a man’s head in its way. Instead, he has just enough time to shoot back, and there’s a blaze of light as the man staggers against the open door in a spray of red, knocking over a lantern burning beside him. Flames lick over the dry wood, arc across the floorboards and up the walls. Django walks past them, pausing only to put two more bullets in the fallen body as he steps over it to drop to his knees beside Hildy and Schultz.

“My friend,” Schultz says, “you are not supposed to take German legends quite so literally.”

Django grunts, sawing through the rope tying them together. “I don’t remember no chatty old white man in any of your stories,” he grumbles. The last coils fall to the floor, and then the heat at the door, the throb of pain in his shoulder, the dying pops of gunshots settling back into silence, none of it matters. He’s gathering them both into his arms, his face damp against Schultz’s cheek, Hildy’s breath ragged by his neck, and he wants nothing more than to stay like that forever. It’s Hildy who has to drag both of the men, stumbling and coughing, back out into the open air, where at last he collapses on his back, watching the cabin spew fire into the black sky.

 

* * *

 

They bury Dinah on the road to Jacob Burkle’s house in Memphis, while the leaves are still crimson and gold, before frost takes the ground. Moses and Lucy stand with one hand on each of Little Harry’s shoulders; the girl’s eyes glisten with tears. Osborne sobs with furious grief, glares up at Django and hisses, “It shoulda been you.”

“Maybe so,” Django says.

“She was a good woman,” Lucy reminds them. “She died free. That’s more than some get.”

Neither Hildy nor Schultz knew her, and so they stand apart from the others, leaning against the side of the wagon and listening to the small group pray for their fallen friend. Django had been nervous to ask them for this, but Hildy had echoed that he’d promised the fugitives he’d get them to safety, and Schultz had muttered that he had some kind of last business to tie up in Tennessee anyway. He’s driven the wagon with all of them piled in the back, challenged once or twice along the road only to reply, quite truthfully, that he’s a bounty hunter transporting six fugitive slaves and two corpses.

One fewer now, as Dinah is shrouded and buried in earth. It strains Django’s wounded shoulder to help them shovel dirt and stones over her body, but he owes her, and all of them, this much. 

“I won’t stop,” he tells Osborne. “It won’t bring her back, but I swear, I ain’t gonna stop fighting until all of us are free.”

For a moment he thinks it’s going to come to blows; the young man’s fists clench at his sides, then relax.

“She’d want that,” he says softly.

“I ain’t gonna stop fighting neither,” Little Harry announces, and Django smiles and tousles her hair, and then they all head back to the wagon and the long road home.


	16. ghost stories

The snow comes early to the mountains that winter, and heralding its arrival, a killing frost that leaves the hills pale yellow and barren. Sheriff Don Gus sits on his porch and blows smoke rings as he watches the wagon make its slow winding progress up the mountain road to his cabin. The rider doffs his bowler hat, the horse bobs his head, and Gus offers a cup of coffee before asking how many corpses are piled in the back of the wagon. 

“Just one,” Schultz says, and there’s an odd catch in his voice. He looks tired. He’s never been physically imposing, but now he’s practically swallowed up by a long sable fur-trimmed coat, leaning on his silver-topped cane, the stiffness evident in his posture.

What’s more unnerving is that for the first time in over a year, he’s alone.

Gus has always been a solitary sort, believing that a man ought to stay out of other men’s business if he can help it, but the bounty hunter looks so strained and sad that it’s an effort not to push food at him and ask him if he’s all right. He’s halfway asleep at the table when Gus puts a mug of coffee in front of him.

“You won’t be running my coffers empty, then,” Gus jokes, but it falls flat. Schultz wraps his fingers around the mug and inhales deeply before taking a sip. Gus catches a glimpse of new scars dotting his hands and wrists.

“Oh,” Schultz says, a shadow of his usual good cheer, “he’s worth a considerable price.” He reaches into his pocket and takes out the handbill.

Gus blinks. “You gotta be shitting me.”

Schultz watches him steadily, impassive. He drains his coffee. “Sheriff,” he says, and there’s no emotion in his words. “I believe you owe me $3000.”

“Show me,” Gus replies.

They go out to the wagon. The body is wrapped in blankets and tied with rope; still, the stench is unbearable despite the cold. Gus has seen a lot of corpses and even so, it’s a macabre sight, the flesh so charred he can barely tell it’s a man, the eye sockets empty, nose gone, the lips burned away to reveal grey teeth in a humorless grimace. Gus quickly covers the head back up. It’s burned beyond recognition—he couldn’t say if the man had once been black or white—but if he had to swear on it, he’d allow that it’s about the right height and build to be Django Freeman.

“He died well?”

“As well as anyone ever does,” Schultz says. “Believe it or not, it was quick.”

“I’ll get you your money.”

It’s been a long time since he’s thrown up on the job, but the instant he’s inside his cabin, he bends over the wash bucket and retches into it. Schultz is still waiting by the wagon, an apparition in black, as Gus swaggers up to him, wiping vomit from his beard. He actually counts the money before he puts it in his billfold.

“You know,” Schultz muses, “before he died, he told me that all men are made of the same stuff, that if you peeled the skin off, you’d find blood and guts and few other differences. I thought it was a curious thing to say, given the unique economic arrangement in this part of the country and our particular relationship to it. I can assume, since you’ve handed me the reward, that fate has proven him correct?”

It takes Gus a moment to tease out what the mad bastard is trying to tell him; he’s not an educated man like Schultz is. He unloads the corpse from the back of the wagon, and despite the unpleasantness of the task, he finds a slow, broad smile stretching across his face.

It’s a wide open country, Gus thinks. There are places a fellow might go to lose himself if he wanted to start over. “I’ll let the judge know that we got his man.”

“Thank you,” Schultz says, and tips his hat again. With some effort, he climbs back into the front of the wagon.

“So Django,” Gus says. “He’s, ah, in a better place now?”

“Who is to say what any man truly deserves,” Schultz replies. “But I believe he’s on his way to one, yes.”

Gus shivers; there’s a chill in the air, and a sense of foreboding as though someone has just walked over his grave. He doesn’t think he’ll see Schultz, or Django or Hildy again. The country is changing, not just the hairline fractures that will tear it to pieces in little more than a year, but the grinding, relentless march of civilization that will tame the wilderness and impose its rules and measures and official seals on the lives they built here. The days when a man can reinvent himself are drawing to a close, if they ever existed at all. He has no doubt that Schultz, wily devil that he is, will weather the storm, but his own time has passed.

Inside his cabin, he yanks Django’s warrant off the wall. He’d papered over it with others; a tiny, probably futile act of resistance, but all that’s allowed to him. He strikes a match and holds it to the corner, and wishes the crazy motherfuckers well.

 

* * *

 

The woods are silent when Schultz dismounts, the fire, ashes. He feels slightly foolish telling the trees, “You can come out now.” 

Django, then Hildy, emerge from between the trunks, their clothing rumpled and leaves stuck in their hair. As dangerous as distractions are at a time like this, he can’t exactly fault them for wanting to blow off steam. Memphis had been a brief respite—a few days spent recovering in the house of a fellow German immigrant with contacts in the Underground Railroad—but having left the fugitives to make their way north, all three of them have been anxious. Seated up front on the wagon with Django and Hildy hiding under blankets in the back, Schultz has barely been able to talk to them. His most steadfast companion has been the burned body draped over the packhorse, and now that’s left him too. 

But now they’re looking at him expectantly and Schultz digs for the improbably thick stack of bills. He’s wrapped the warrant around it to keep the money together.

Hildy, ever practical, asks, “Did he believe you?”

Schultz shrugs. “He isn’t stupid. We should lay low for now—we’d have to anyways—but I think…” His weakened right side gives a twinge of pain, and he shifts his stance. “I think it’s over now.”

“Doc.” He feels Django’s hand on his back, steadying him. “You don’t look so good.”

He passes Django the money, glad enough, for once, to part ways with the cash. It feels tainted somehow, as if it was truly bought with his partner’s corpse and not with his tormentor’s.

“All of it?” Django asks, though he doesn’t wait for an answer before putting it away.

Schultz swallows past a lump in his throat. He’s been waiting for an opening, for some space where their lives aren’t in immediate danger, and he knows he probably won’t get another one. “There is nothing I want more than for both of you to stay with me,” he says. “But not if it’s because you feel that you have no other choice. No one is coming for you now. Death affords you a certain protection, my lad, and a large sum of money will afford you even more. If you want to leave, if the two of you would rather strike out on your own, this is your best chance.”

Django opens his mouth as if to speak, then thinks better of it. Tentatively, he lifts Schultz’s chin with one hand and kisses him. Their foreheads bump together and Schultz feels his rumbling almost-laugh more than he hears it. His breath tastes of smoke and sex, of things forbidden and suddenly, inexplicably granted. Hildy wraps her arms around his waist and presses her face into his back, and he starts shaking with relief despite himself.

This isn’t a goodbye.

Django comes up for air long enough to say, “For fuck’s sake, white boy, where else would we want to be?”

“I won’t ask again,” Schultz says weakly. “I don’t think I have the fortitude.”

Django strokes his hair, runs his thumb over the outer shell of his ear, and he leans into the touch, starved for it, for both of them. Hildy slides his coat off, and then, in tandem, they’re pushing and pulling him into one of the tents, onto a nest of blankets and furs. Neither of the tents are really large enough for three, especially with Django awkwardly trying to position himself to that he’s not carrying much weight on his injured shoulder. His elbows and knees keep bumping up against the poles, threatening to collapse the whole structure, and inside isn’t much of an improvement over the windswept forest. But even as they’re both rapidly shedding clothes, their skin is scalding hot, the friction of three bodies frantically rutting up against each other such that he barely notices the cold by the time Hildy’s finished with his shirt buttons. Her breasts feel heavy in his palms, and he plants soft kisses over them. She kneels in front of him, her legs straddling his, her hands—the left with two fingers splinted together; he bends down to press his lips to the edge of the bandages—tracing the fading cigarette burns on his chest.

“So don’t ask again,” Hildy tells him.

And then he’s pressing kisses to every part of their bodies that he can reach, overruling the various complaints his body makes. Django laughs again and pulls him into his lap, kneads his shoulders and drags his mouth across his neck. It doesn’t do a thing to still his urges, but both of them are apparently of a mind to tease him until he’s begging for it, and there’s nothing to be done when they’re like that beyond giving into them.

They go on like that for almost longer than he can stand, until every tiny sensation—Django’s fingers rubbing the scar above his hip with just enough pressure to work out the soreness and tension there, Hildy’s breath soft against his thigh—has him squirming and gasping and wondering if his heart can take it, and then finally Django parts his ass and Hildy licks a long stripe up his cock, and his vision goes white around the edges. He’s had no shortage of lovers over the years, male and female, despite the puritanical streak that characterizes his adopted country. Not one has ever robbed him of his prized self-control, left him like this, breathless and whimpering and craving every hesitant, delicate touch.

“You are going to kill me,” he gasps out.

Django presses his face against the back of his neck, his eyelashes tickling the skin there, then twists away, his hands returning a torturous moment later slick with oil. Schultz realizes that the two of them planned this, waiting to ambush him when he came back, and blushes down the length of his body. He strokes patterns over Hildy’s arms as she tongues the underside of his cock, then takes him into her mouth.

“Gotta admit, Doc,” a slippery finger slides into him, crooks in exactly the right way, “be a helluva way to go.” A second finger joins it, stretching him open and rubbing the spot inside him that sends bursts of ecstasy shooting up his spine. He’s half-convinced he’ll come just from that alone. “Feel good?”

“Yes, _mein Gott_ , don’t you dare stop, either of you.”

Hildy giggles around his dick, and it’s almost enough to bring him over the edge. And then Django’s lifting him as though he weighed nothing, and he sinks back down onto the younger man’s cock. He’s still for a moment, reveling in the fullness of Django’s length inside of him, and then rocks onto his lap, slowly at first, then harder as Django’s hips buck up under him. He takes a few thrusts before his side starts to hurt, and mumbling apologies, repositions all of them so that he can lie down. Hildy crawls up to face him. Her legs hook around his, and with one hand, she guides his cock inside of her, already wet and impossibly hot.

He groans, echoes Django’s sure strokes into Hildy, and the three of them fall into a rhythm not unlike that of the hunt, the build of anticipation and the shudder of release. He wonders what he’s done to deserve this before he realizes that he’s asked it out loud.

“You really want a list?” Django grits out, “Now?”

“Maybe later,” he agrees, and Django comes in pulses into him and he seizes against Hildy, tears leaking from his shut eyes. He doesn’t last long after that—nor does she—and he’s sobbing out his release between them, cradled in their arms.

The much-abused tent chooses that moment to collapse.

Hildy covers her mouth to stifle laughter, and the two men grudgingly push the tent posts back up to something reasonably stable. “You got a bed in your house, Doc?” Django asks.

“Of course.”

“That’s somethin’ to look forward to.”

“I can think of a few other things.” The immediate problem solved, he nestles back into the blankets beside Hildy. She makes a startled sound, then laughs again.

“What?” Django sits down beside them. She takes his hand, then Schultz’s, and places them on her swollen belly. He can just feel something moving beneath his palm.

“He kicked,” Hildy says, and for the first time there’s no trace of sadness at the thought of the baby.

“Kid’s gonna be a fighter,” Django says.

“With this family, how could he not be?” Hildy squeezes Schultz’s hand so he knows that she means him, too. One day—maybe one day soon, even—he might be able to tell them why that matters so much, why there’s nothing greater they could have given to him.

For now, though, he’s content to be held by them, warm despite the raging wind outside, his own ghosts quieted as he drifts into dreamless sleep.

 

* * *

 

Schultz lives in a walk-up above the now-vacant dentist office that still has his name painted above the door. It takes him several tries at the rusted lock before he’s able to even get them inside. Browned paper peels off the walls along the staircase, revealing rot below. 

Inside, a thick coating of dust blankets the distinctly Old World furniture, but the rooms are otherwise orderly but for the towers of books and newspapers that threaten to avalanche at the slightest provocation. A bloodstained and tattered black, red, and gold flag is tacked to one wall, faded circus posters decorating another. There’s a writing desk, covered with papers as well, and a single bed.

It’s hardly how she imagined he’d live, and quite unlike any white person’s home she’s ever been inside. From the looks of it, he’d gathered his worldly possessions in one place, locked the door, and promptly run as far as he could.

She forces the creaking, rusted window open. It’s cold outside, not quite winter, and the fresh air and light is an improvement over the musty smell of old books and dust and mildew.

“It requires some work,” Schultz says, dusting off a chair with an embarrassment that seems absurd to two people who’ve never lived anywhere better than slaves’ cabins.

“It’s home,” Django assures him.

It’s a tomb, but Hildy can imagine it restored to life, the spare room cleared out for the baby’s crèche. They’ll have to get logs for the wood stove; for now, it’s no worse than sleeping outside, and at least sheltered from the wind. Her body, trained over the long months to be constantly tense and on guard, doesn’t know what to do now that she’s inside, and safe, so she paces restlessly, scans the rows of books in search of something familiar. Finally, she picks up a book of German fairy tales lying on the desk and flips through it. There’s a world of difference between reading handbills and the dense letters of a book, she realizes, but she tells herself that there will be time to learn.

At the front is an inscription in the careful, precise handwriting of someone just learning his letters:

 

> _To King,_
> 
> _One day, they will tell stories about us._
> 
> _Your friend always,_
> 
> _Wilhelm_
> 
> _8.5.49_

 

She puts it back quickly, sensing it’s not something she’s supposed to see, but Schultz says, “You can ask. If you want.”

The papers on the desk, issues of _Neue Rheinische Zeitung,_ also stop in 1849. “Who was he?”

Schultz’s voice is hoarse, his accent more pronounced than usual. “A friend. A lover too, on occasion, though not in the way I might have wanted, and well below my station. But those were unusual days, in which we thought all men might suddenly become free and equal and in which a young factory worker and a wealthy dentist might find that they had a good deal in common. Everywhere there were riots, revolutionary committees, talk of a constitution and freedom and nationhood. We joined the citizens’ militia, just boys with guns, but we felt positive that we would change the world.” He laughs bitterly. “We had a year. That is more freedom than many get.”

“What happened?” Django asks.

“The government sent in troops to crush us,” Schultz says, as though he’s told the story a hundred times. “They blew our barricades apart and shot down everyone: men, women, children. Two days after he gave me that book, he died bleeding out in the street like a dog. And for me, imprisonment, exile, and a very long journey to America. I was a yard or two from him, hidden from him and the soldiers both. I’ve been running ever since.” He smoothes his fingers over his moustache and shakes his head. “I would have died in his place if I could have.”

Hildy bends down and kisses his cheek. “I’m glad you didn’t,” she says.

“And how can I not be,” he replies, rising from the chair to first embrace her, then Django, “when I find myself here?”

After a long time, she pulls away from them to gaze out the window at the street below. The sun paints the row houses and saloons in splashes of amber and pink. The first traffic of the morning—farmers heading to the market, street cleaners sweeping over the roads and gutters, a boy hawking newspapers at the corner—wakes the sleeping city.

It will not be an easy life, for them, for the child when it comes, but it is more than she’d ever expected.

Django’s amused by a garish poster on the wall. “I thought you was making that circus stuff up,” he says. “You know. A role. What’d you do in the circus, Doc?”

A wicked gleam comes into his eyes. He walks over to the window and closes the blinds. “I was a sword-swallower,” he says, completely deadpan, and takes Django by the elbow. “Would you like to see a magic trick?”

Hildy follows them into the bedroom, and thinks yes, they’ll be all right.


	17. epilogue: troublemakers

They don’t ride off into the sunset.

There will be killing to do, in time. Already, there are secret meetings at the Turnverein, the men who meet there stockpiling and drilling with rifles as the South begins to stir and tensions rise between their mostly immigrant, mostly pro-Union neighbors and the Confederate sympathizers that share their city in an uneasy peace. In a year, under General Lyon’s command, they will join the troops surrounding Camp Jackson as the country cannibalizes itself; in two, there will be long months of separation bridged only by letters with too many worried spaces between them.

But today, Hildy is finishing her speech at the hall, her eyes blurring over the rows of pale men in white suits as they bring their hands together. For her. She ducks her head, blushing. Django speaks at the Turnverein on occasion—most of the men who attend have been in America for a decade and speak English fluently—but the novelty of a freed slave who can give speeches in German has yet to wear off, and they frequently ask for her to address the abolitionist meetings there. She catches Schultz’s gaze for a relieved moment, smiles shyly as he covers James’ ears in a probably futile attempt to keep the baby from waking. She curtsies and steps off the stage. Some of the men, their curiosity about her seemingly bottomless, try to continue the conversation, but Schultz comes to her rescue, brushing them aside as politely as he can manage and bustling her outside into the bright June sun.

She takes James from him and then hooks her arm through his. “You did well,” he tells her.

“They’re already abolitionists,” Hildy replies. “It ain’t like I’m changing their minds about anything.” Still, they’re enthusiastic about her, enough to overlook both her peculiar living arrangement and her suspiciously un-feminine proficiency with firearms. Most people in their neighborhood are Forty-Eighters like Schultz, and of a decidedly liberal mindset, and seem to accept without too many questions that he disappeared for several years to the South and returned with a young family he’d rescued from the horrors of the flesh trade. If they wonder why the Von Shafts haven’t struck out on their own, or what improprieties take place behind those paper-thin walls, they are discreet enough to keep it to themselves.

“They’ll be waging a war soon enough,” Schultz says. “It’s important to remind them of why.”

After eight months in St. Louis, Hildy is a city girl, and she draws stares as much for her fashionable periwinkle morning dress and bonnet as she does for the scar on her face or the company she keeps. Her head is held high and no one, not even a stranger unaware of Schultz’s reputation, would mistake her for his slave, or him for her master. She’s not the first freed black to take refuge in the city, nor will she be the last, the freedom bond law on the books but rarely imposed. For the first time in her life, she’s not constantly looking over her shoulder. 

Schultz barely limps now; his own scars ache when it rains, but on a sunny afternoon, having just returned from a heated debate about whether war or diplomacy will ultimately end the evils of slavery, and arm-in-arm with a beautiful lady, he looks his very much his old self, and happy. She hopes it’s not just an act for her sake or for Django’s.

She’s sure, at least, that his affection for their child brings him genuine happiness. They don’t share blood, but he’d helped bring James into the world nevertheless, wrestled, as was every joy in their lives, from blood and suffering and terror. (Two years from now, when there’s another child, a golden-skinned girl with an unmistakable mischievous streak, those inclined to look askance at the family are merely reminded of the deadly reputation of all three adults in the house, and refrain from speculating aloud.)

When they get home, Django is bent over the writing desk, as he so often is these days. No one is as surprised as he is that he’d exchange—if only temporarily—the rifle for the pen. But Schultz had bought him several published slave narratives that are popular amongst the abolitionists, and now he’s stubbornly determined to write his own.

“I hope you’ll leave me out of it,” Schultz complains. When he left St. Louis four years ago, Hildy’s learned, he’d been considered an amoral son-of-a-gun by his fellow exiles and was quite appalled to discover that he’s been elevated to living sainthood in their eyes on account of his having liberated actual slaves. “I have quite enough notoriety as it is.”

Django barely looks up from his manuscript. “You want me to lie?”

“ _Embellish_ , my dear boy.”

“I don’t see what the hurry is,” Hildy says, positioning an arm in between Django and the desk. “Ain’t like your life story’s going anywhere.”

“I made a promise,” Django says softly. “To keep fighting.” He looks guiltily at the papers but abandons them, for now, in favor of his wife, their lover, and their infant son, who gurgles happily when Django takes him to put him down for his nap. It’s hard sometimes for Hildy to take her eyes off James, a hazy, distant dream miraculously made living, born into freedom without the knowledge of the chains that had bound his parents. She loves him fiercely, desperately, is amazed that the love she bears Django and Schultz is somehow multiplied beyond reckon in his presence.

The $3000 reward and the warrant with Django’s name on it sit in a box in the drawer of the writing desk. They never look at it. (Years from now, James’ daughter will find it while rampaging through her grandparents’ house, and force Schultz to tell her the story of how Django was once a wanted man, and Hildy will somehow manage to use the story as a measure to manipulate her normally rambunctious brood of grandchildren into well-behaved angels for the rest of their visit.)

The guns sit in a cabinet, gathering dust; waiting, as patient things do, for the day when they will be needed again.

But that day seems far off, and the afternoon lies sultry and inviting before them, the sun sparkling through an open window and the spring wind floating conversation and laughter from the street below. Hildy takes the hands of both men and drags them, grinning, to the bedroom, determined to make the most of the time that remains.

 

FIN

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Eeek! That was kind of long, wasn’t it?
> 
> I swear, I started this story as a quick one-off with only two ideas in my head. The first, coming out of the movie, was that all three of these kids were adorable and had crazy chemistry with each other, and someone should write a fix-it where Schultz survives somehow and then they all have a threesome. (By the time I got around to writing enough to post, several other people had gotten the same idea, but it’s not like there can be too much porn in the world. Right? Right.)
> 
> The second was a review that a friend of mine wrote, which, among other things, made a strong case for Schultz being in exile after the failed 1848 revolutions in Europe. Which, in retrospect, made his character that much more awesome, so I decided that I wanted to write about that too.
> 
> Somehow this turned into a 38,000+ word story with very little porn, quite a lot of plot, an embarrassing soundtrack, ridiculous amounts of research, and a browser history that, should I unexpectedly die, is going to raise some eyebrows.
> 
> If you’re curious, here are things that I totally didn’t make up:
> 
> \- Captain Caldwell’s Gonzales Rangers were real, and fought in the Battle of Plum Creek. (Handsome Jack Stone is totally fictional, though.)  
> \- Jacob Burkle was a German businessman who allegedly hid fugitive slaves in the basement of his house. It’s now a museum dedicated to the Underground Railroad.  
> \- The massacre in Düsseldorf occurred on May 9, 1849. Friedrich Engels wrote about it in "Neue Rheinische Zeitung," a short-lived but influential daily newspaper.  
> \- The Turnvereine (Turner halls) were, of all things, gymnastics clubs with political ties to abolitionist and labor movements. Many German veterans of the 1848 revolution ended up joining the Union forces through recruitment there, eventually comprising the Western Turner Rifles. (If you Google “st louis german turner shooting club,” you will find an awesome old timey picture.)
> 
> Oh yes, and apropos of nothing, the title is a line from Billy Bragg’s “Tender Comrade,” which you should check out if you haven’t heard it.
> 
> Anyway, thank you thank you thank you to everyone who commented, critiqued, left kudos, followed, favorited, or read this monstrosity. I haven’t actually finished any writing in four years, and so it’s gratifying to know that not only can I put something out, but that other people like it too. You are all lovely people and I am beaming little cartoon hearts in your direction.
> 
> P.S. Do you want to see amazeballs fanart of Handsome Jack? Of course you do. CatBountry made some. [Check it out!](http://catbountry.tumblr.com/post/102582922696/the-last-of-the-sketch-pages-im-posting-today)


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